BERNARD SHAW 

A CRITICAL STUDY 

BY 
P. P. HOWE 



NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1915 



-n: 






PRINTED BY WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. 
PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. INTRODUCTION IN DEFIANCE OF 

POSTERITY 9 

II. ECONOMICS 21 

III. AESTHETICS 47 

IV. DRAMATICS 81 
V. THE SECRET IN THE POET'S HEART 138 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 167 



INTRODUCTION IN 
DEFIANCE OF POSTERITY 



There is a singular modern heresy, sprung 
from one does not quite know where, according 
to which it is not possible to speak the truth 
about a writer until that writer is dead; nor 
can the truth be then immediately spoken, for 
in the record of the dead, as is well known, we 
must see nothing but the good. The result of 
this double inhibition is curious but frequently 
observed : it is to shift the burden of critical 
appraisal on to the shoulders of posterity. 
There was once a man, we are told, who 
refused to do anything for posterity on the 
ground that posterity had done nothing for 
him ; but now we find his saw of little might. 
In the field at least of literary judgment, we are 
becoming accustomed to leave to posterity a 
very delicate and a very difficult duty. Pos- 
terity to-day is very far from doing nothing for 
us ; posterity is in the habit of making up our 
minds. 

9 



BERNARD SHAW 

Now criticism will do well, on any ground, 
to offer its opposition to this modern attitude 
of deference towards posterity, at least in its 
more extreme manifestations. At the outset of 
a labour such as the present one, the subject of 
which happens to be happily far from dead, 
criticism has flatly to refuse to be intimidated. 
It might begin with a " Far be it from the 
present writer to usurp the functions of 
posterity," or a " We are too near the subject 
of this study to see his work in a just perspec- 
tive " ; but, while the preliminary and liberal 
use of these phrases would gain for their user 
great credence — since the majority of readers, 
and one's self among them, are ever open to 
the familiar pleasure of the incantation — the 
loss would be more effective than the gain. 
One cannot for ever be saying " perhaps " ; 
the polite labour is intolerable. It might be 
different if the subject of the present study 
were to be treated here to a biographical 
explication. A man's personal deeds, a man's 
private reactions from and upon his con- 
temporaries, the varying amounts of a man's 
bank balance, have all their relevance, even 
their artistic relevance, when his life comes to 
be written ; and it is perfectly true, indeed it 
is obvious, that a man's life cannot be written 
until the life has been lived — although the 

10 



INTRODUCTION 

attempt sometimes is made. (It has been 
made in the case of our own subject.) Here, if 
you hke, is a function for posterity, although 
not necessarily for a posterity indefinitely 
removed. 

But with the public works of a creative 
artist it is different. I know of no real distinc- 
tion in kind which should make it any more 
impossible for us to know what we think, and 
to say it, in regard to a man's just-finished 
play or picture than in regard to St. Paul's 
Cathedral, which also is finished. You may 
speak of the difficulty of getting the work into 
a just perspective ; but then the difficulty of 
getting St. Paul's Cathedral into a just perspec- 
tive was no more and no less on the day it was 
completed than it is to-day — if anything, 
indeed, it was less difficult, because you had 
not the irrelevant accretions which interfere 
with the view. You had, of course, to step 
back to do it. Now this act of stepping back 
is, or should be, a commonplace of criticism ; 
its achievement is what is known as an attitude 
of detachment. By all means criticism should 
be detached. Let us suppose this attitude to 
be difficult, and you will then know your 
critic by his ability to achieve it ; but you will 
not of necessity postpone all critical absolutes 
until the attitude of detachment is mechani- 

11 



BERNARD SHAW 

cally inevitable through passage of time. 
There is small credit in the act of stepping back 
from an object which has already receded into 
a comfortable middle distance. You do not 
praise a man for his attitude of detachment in 
regard to the train which has left him behind 
on the platform. And the criticism of posterity 
is in this position of vantage, that its attitude 
of detachment is found ready made. This 
would amount to a positive and an inherent 
superiority, worthy perhaps of all the deference 
which our day is ready to pay to it, if it were 
not for the fact that works of art are all the 
same age. There are changes in taste that are 
cyclical, but these again it is part of the elemen- 
tary business of criticism to allow for, as a 
skilful golfer allows for the wind. 

If there were any absolute critical windfall, as 
it were, which "fell in" to posterity, we should 
expect every utterance made at this distance of 
time about Shakespeare to be laden with riches ; 
while the plain truth is that it is as easy to-day 
to write nonsense about Shakespeare as it is to 
write nonsense about Mr. Shaw. No sooner is 
Shakespeare's self-criticism in terms of marble 
and the gilded monuments of princes excluded 
(on the ground that no man can achieve an 
attitude of detachment in regard to his own 
works), than the contemporary judgment of 

12 



INTRODUCTION 

Ben Jonson, which betrayed a regrettable 
unwillingness to stand aside and let posterity 
have the last word, is seen to have proved 
disturbingly near to the mark. If distance in 
itself, which lends enchantment to the view, 
were the creator in addition of some absolute 
value, we should have to conclude that Mr. 
Shaw's criticism of Shakespeare, for example, 
must be juster than Hazlitt's in the exact ratio 
of three to two — that being the degree in 
which the astigmatism had been corrected. 
But the fact is, of course, that the whole 
of the contributory value of criticism, the 
benefit accruing from a just appraisal, lies 
in the critic's eye — in the normality of 
the personal vision. Regarded as objective 
material for the exercise of that vision, there is 
not the smallest difference between the text of 
Homer and the text of Mr. Hardy, between a 
play by Shakespeare and a play by Mr. Shaw. 
Hamlet defined an excellent play as one well 
digested in the scenes and set down with as 
much modesty as cunning ; and if you are 
willing to adopt that as your standard of 
judgment, or at least to admit that it is a 
recognizable standard of judgment, there is no- 
thing to prevent its application to Mr. Shaw's 
plays as well as to the play in which Hamlet 
himself appears. It would be different if it 

13 



BERNARD SHAW 

were the absolute truth that personal criticism 
pretended to speak ; for since truth is only to 
be found in the accumulation of judgments, 
we might then have to waive our own right of 
judgment, as we are so often invited to do, in 
favour of the " judgment of time." But a 
criticism which has learned the A B C of its 
business does not pretend it is the absolute 
truth it is speaking. It pretends to speak the 
truth that is in it ; and what more, if we 
demand for it a single mouthpiece, can poor 
posterity do ? 

II 

Now the subject of this study, as it happens, 
has had something to say about the normality 
of the critical vision, as well as about the part 
properly played by posterity. The subject of 
this study has had something to sa}^ about 
most things. As regards normal vision, Mr. 
Shaw has narrated one of the most justly 
celebrated of his anecdotal reminiscences. The 
story goes that he went to the oculist to 
have his eyesight reported upon, and was 
profoundly dashed, as a lifelong believer in his 
own eccentricity, when told that it was 
" normal " ; a temporary disappointment from 
which our subject quickly recovered, however, 
when he learned that the eyesight of only five 

14 



INTRODUCTION 

per cent, or fifteen per cent, or whatever the 
proportion is of the population, was normal. 
At this fresh evidence that he was one of a 
good swingeing minority — a minority which he 
has since publicly estimated at the proportion 
of one to forty-eight millions — our subject was 
correspondingly elated ; and, being elated, he 
wrote a preface about it. With the aid of this 
clinical misnomer for analogy, our subject 
established conclusively, to his own satisfac- 
tion, that he it was alone who saw life steadily 
and saw it whole, while the rest of his fellows — 
the " abnormal " herd of the forty-eight 
millions — were unfortunate enough to see it 
asquint. The importance of this event in the 
career of our subject can hardly be over- 
estimated ; for since we all of us wish to be 
normal, and since Mr. Shaw alone among us is 
normal, or almost alone — the five or the fifteen 
per cent might be regarded, at a generous 
estimate, as the members of the Fabian 
Society — it follows of necessity that he has had 
to do his best to teach us to see with his eyes 
ever since. Our subject is far too thorough a 
humanitarian to have endured, beyond his 
twenty-fourth year or so, the spectacle of the 
blind leading the blind. Fortunately for us, 
and in the mercy of Providence, our subject 
has seen it on the whole as a comic spectacle. 

15 



BERNARD SHAW 

Waggery, as he says, has been his medium. 
But our subject has hved to deplore that what 
he has uttered in jest we have not taken in 
earnest ; and it is in this regard that he has 
lent himself to the appeal to posterity. Of 
course, since the forty-eight millions of us are 
in enjoyment of a vision which is aberred, our 
opinion of what precisely our subject has been 
up to can hardly be worth taking. But the 
appeal to posterity has been made by our 
subject not only by what one might call the 
authority of the Census (a census of folly which 
Carlyle was the first to take), but also by the 
light of philosophy ; for " a jest," he has 
declared, " is an earnest in the womb of time." 
Now Hamlet, if he did not say that, said 
something very much like it, and the thought 
has been long enough in the world for one to 
have, on general grounds, no quarrel with it. 
Twenty years ago, when our subject was 
writing the ripest of his stage comedies, the 
motor-car was a jest which had to proceed, 
under statutory enactment, at a walking pace 
with a man with a red flag in front of it. To 
have proposed in the year 1894, from your 
place in the House, that the legal limit for 
motor-cars should be what it is at present, 
would have been to run serious risk of being 
unseated on petition as a jester. The jest of a 

16 



INTRODUCTION 

legal limit of twenty miles an hour has now for 
some time been an earnest (and a shameful 
thing it should be so low ! — that is what we 
to-day are saying) ; if Mr. Shaw tells us that 
twenty years ago it was a jest which was an 
earnest in the womb of time, we shall understand 
him quite perfectly. For centuries in England 
it was a jest to say that pigs might fly, and 
pigs may fly to-day any afternoon they are 
taken to Hendon. On general grounds, then, 
no quarrel is possible with our subject's utter- 
ance, that a jest is an earnest in the womb of 
time. But on the particular ground of Mr. 
Shaw's own jests, we have to refuse very 
positively one inference from this utterance, or 
else this study cannot possibly be proceeded 
with. For one inference is that a jest of Mr. 
Shaw's cannot fairly be the subject of criticism 
until it has issued from the womb of time in 
good earnest. In other words, we may not say 
that we think Mr. Shaw wrong until we have 
given Time time to prove him right. We may 
not say that we think Mr. Shaw right for fear 
that posterity should know him to be wrong. 
If Mr. Shaw prophesies the full working 
beauties of Social Democracy in England (as 
he does, if only we miserable forty-eight 
millions have the will), we may not say whether 
we should personally fancy Social Democracy 
B 17 



BERNARD SHAW 

until we find ourselves in the middle of it. 
In other words, we are to get it, and then to 
have full liberty to say whether we are happy 
or not. We are not to say whether we like the 
Superman until we find ourselves Supermen — 
or until our posterity find that they are 
nothing of the sort. 

Now this is the negation of criticism, and, 
ridiculous as it may appear, it is yet not far 
from what is sometimes, implicitly or ex- 
plicitly, put forward. We may not say whether 
we should like posterity to regard Mr. Shaw 
as a great man or not, and in what particulars, 
until posterity has had an opportunity for 
declaring for itself in the matter. Far be it 
from the present writer to usurp the functions 
of posterity ; but there is one function which 
posterity cannot perform, and that is to add to 
the illumination of the present. To-morrow's 
moon may have shaken off its attendant clouds, 
but to-morrow's moon won't help us home 
to-night to supper, and we had far better be 
guided by the light of our own horn lantern. 
Our subject has complained that he has 
written plays to explain his views, and has 
written prefaces to explain his plays, and that 
he could quite well explain the prefaces if he 
chose, only the result would be that people 
who have misunderstood the plays and the 

18 



INTRODUCTION 

prefaces would misunderstand the further 
explanations ten times more. If this statement 
of affairs were the plain truth, this book would 
have to look no further for its justification ; 
on the analogy of the national game (which one 
is sure our subject must dislike extremely) one 
might advocate a change of bowling. But 
though our subject has spoken the truth that 
is in him, no man more gallantly, it cannot be 
described as the plain truth. When Mr. Shaw 
seems to assert (if he can forgive the metaphor) 
that he has bowled his heart out and failed to 
reach the wicket, the assertion is excessive. 
No man of letters has taken the middle stump 
of his generation more successfully, but while 
he has been attacking in earnest the defenders 
have insisted upon regarding it as only a game. 
Now that has its tragic aspects ; and it is 
apparent already that the task of this study 
will be nine parts that of reconciliation. " I 
shall desire you of more acquaintance, good 
Master Cobweb." Only if our subject is 
disappointed in contemporaneity because it 
has taken the jest and left the earnest, not- 
withstanding that our age, as he says, " walks 
visibly pregnant with it," we cannot leave it 
to posterity to settle their difference. If this 
task becomes a study in embryotomy, we shall 
have to go through with it. 

19 



BERNARD SHAW 

III 
Let us assert, then, at the outset of this task, 
that since its subject has issued to the world a 
considerable body of work it is possible to 
know, and to say, what we think of that body 
of work. In face of the fact that that body of 
work has patently not been without influence 
on its generation, let us assert that the time has 
come when it is possible to appraise that 
influence. Let us even assert the belief that, 
added to as we hope that work will be, its 
total value will not now be considerably 
augmented or modified ; coupling with this 
belief another, that that work's influence has 
at this moment reached a point at which it is 
singularly susceptible of at least approximate 
estimation. In both these regards posterity 
will enjoy a natural advantage over us ; but we 
need not be discouraged on that account. Let 
us add, in conclusion of these critical prelimi- 
naries, that the natural advantages posterity 
will enjoy in the matter of biographical expli- 
cation posterity is hereby left in undisputed 
possession of; for biographical explication is no 
part of the intention of the present study. The 
deprivation may be suffered all the more will- 
ingly since the subject of our study, we may 
be sure, will continue to be his own biographer. 

20 



II 

ECONOMICS 



If we turn in this section of this study to 
the consideration of Mr. Shaw as pohtical 
economist, it is with no wish to surprise that we 
do so. For if we come to think about it, it was 
to pohtical economy that Mr. Shaw himself 
turned first, if we neglect for the moment (but 
only for the moment) his almost but not 
entirely negligible novels. And if we do not 
think about it, if we have not, that is to say, the 
sequential order of our subject's career as 
clearly before us as we should have if it were his 
biography we were engaged on, do we not then 
with equal ease deduce the economist from the 
dramatist ? It will be some part of the purpose 
of this study to do so. We shall find that Mr. 
Shaw, in his capacity as dramatist (and that, 
after all, is only one of his capacities), has built, 
not on the human heart, as Browning's Sordello 
exhorted the poet to do, but on the " economic 
man" of the economists. And if my word is 
not conclusive, as, at this stage, it can hardly 

21 



BERNARD SHAW 

be expected to be, we have the word of Mr. 
Shaw himself, who wrote in a letter to 
Professor Henderson, " In all my plays my 
economic studies have played as important a 
part as a knowledge of anatomy does in the 
works of Michael Angelo." 



II 

There is no man who prides himself more on 
the normality of his vision than the economist ; 
indeed, he is often a man who thinks that no 
other men have any vision at all. Political 
economy is the only game you may engage in 
(except perhaps politics) with forty-eight million 
pawns, and have for your board the national 
exchequer. At the same time it is one of the 
most secret of vices ; more secret than politics, 
in which you have occasionally to meet your 
opponent at the poll, although you need never 
meet his arguments. But the political econo- 
mist may go on playing his own game in his own 
corner, awarding us our income under his pet 
law of wages, which he terms an "iron" law, 
and disposing of it to his own satisfaction ; and 
we, who make our living and spend it — or who 
spend it without making it — may not be aware 
of his existence. I suppose there are not ten 
men at this moment in the City of London, 

22 



ECONOMICS 

engaged in bringing us our bread, who have the 
smallest grasp of the economic theory, as 
distinct from the business principle, of what 
they are doing. This is neither to their credit 
nor their discredit ; the unreality of the econ- 
omist is almost a point of faith in England. 
Partly the reason is that the orthodox econo- 
mists have contented themselves with " ex- 
plaining " the system by which we live, and 
as their explanation has always amounted to 
one hundred good reasons why that system 
cannot possibly be different in any respect, it 
is no surprise that we have not taken the 
trouble to read them. For the system by 
which one lives, the iron laws, that is to say, 
which govern the fact that one's particular 
slice of bread and butter is no bigger, is not a 
thing one wants to read about — merely to 
learn that one's slice can be no bigger. It is not 
a thing like the theory of music, without some 
study of which one cannot be a musician ; or 
the theory of literary technique, without which 
one cannot write good novels (despite a very 
general belief to the contrary). By the sweat 
of one's brow to earn one's bread is partly an 
instinct and partly a stern necessity ; and there 
is small blame to the plain man if he think 
neither his instincts nor his necessities a proper 
subject for theoretic study. 

23 



BERNARD SHAW 

But the Socialists altered all this, because 
they said to the plain man if you study the 
theory of the system by which you live you will 
see that your slice may be, nay ought to be, 
bigger. The Socialists thus provided the first 
definite inducement in the history of the world 
(for the study is as old as Aristotle) for the 
plain man to read the economists. He would 
read the orthodox economists, that is to say, to 
find them out ; to detect in their writings 
what Bentham called the sinister interest — to 
convict them of canonizing a system merely 
because it was the system that was current. 
The Socialists he would read to obtain a glimpse 
of an ideal system ; or to learn how, by a 
catastrophic upheaval of the simplest kind, he 
might increase the size of his own slice of bread 
and butter. Unfortunately the Socialists, when 
they were economists, were not very good 
artists, and when they were artists, were not very 
good economists ; and frequently they were 
neither. How charming a picture Fourier 
might have made of the phalanstery, if he had 
had one quarter of the art of Sir Thomas More ; 
but he had not any at all, merely the vocabu- 
lary of his calling, which was that of a com- 
mercial traveller. How persuasive Marx might 
have been, if his explanation that all values are 
only definite masses of congealed labour-time, 

24 



ECONOMICS 

and therefore the sole property of the plain 
man, had not been more positively unreadable 
than the explanations of the orthodox econo- 
mists, in addition to being less accurate. With 
what eagerness we should have thrown our- 
selves into the Utopia of Morris, if the limpid 
and beautiful book had contained any more 
precise instructions for its attainment than 
the conversion of the Houses of Parliament 
into a municipal dung-heap. But it didn't ; 
and even though England for once had grown a 
Socialist, instead of importing him — Fourier, 
Saint-Simon, Engels, Marx — the system went 
on working, and the orthodox economists went 
on explaining it to the entire satisfaction of 
themselves and of the very few people whp 
wanted to listen. 

Ill 

That was the position when our subject made 
his double discovery, that his eyesight was 
normal and that the population of these 
islands were mostly fools. (Both these dis- 
coveries are undated, but I think we may take 
them as occurring not long after 1856, in which 
year Mr. Shaw was born in Dublin. I am 
aware that News from Nowhere did not make 
its appearance until 1890, fourteen years after 
Mr. Shaw came to London, and a year later 

25 



BERNARD SHAW 

than Fabian Essays.) I think it probable that 
a third discovery antedated these two by a 
httle, and that was our subject's discovery that 
he was a good hand at an explanation ; indeed, 
if it were the custom to record as religiously the 
first words of great men as it is their last — a 
custom which presents unfortunate difficulties 
since there is no way of knowing a great man 
in his cradle — we may be pretty sure that the 
first words of our subject would prove to be, 
" Let me explain." Once more, whether this 
were so or whether this were not so (and it is 
a domestic scene which, if it occurred, Mr. 
Shaw has omitted unaccountably from his 
so carefully presented reminiscences), we should 
be inclined to deduce it from our subject's 
work in general ; in which, whether dramatic 
or extra-dramatic, no three words have en- 
joyed more frequent recurrence. For every 
reason, then, of destination and of choice, the 
field of the political economist was open to 
our subject. He found it for the first time in 
the history of English letters an arena in which 
a man who was bent upon catching the eye of 
his generation might seriously think of suc- 
ceeding. Ruskin had Thackeray to thank for 
a good deal when he found Unto this Last too 
shocking for the Cornhill ; but Ruskin wrote 
before the Socialists had rendered the explana- 

26 



ECONOMICS 

tions of the orthodox economists really in- 
teresting to the general public, and he had 
made his name in other fields before he turned 
to teaching political economy to young ladies' 
academies and to long-suffering and hypo- 
thetical working men. It is impossible to 
assert that the physiocratic sentimentalism of 
Ruskin, in spite of the eloquence of its ex- 
pression, has very much influence in England 
at this moment. But our subject found in the 
orthodox economist a prime instance of the 
" hopelessly private person " for whom, doubt- 
less by nature, he had an antipathy. He 
found a sufficient number of persons — shall we 
say that he found the newspapers ? — willing 
to give their attention to the phenomenon of 
the Socialists turning upon the system of 
society the guns they had wrested from the 
hands of its trusted if neglected defenders, 
the economists. He found within his own 
person an exceptional brain, quite equal to 
doing rather better in any field of public 
activity that it chose than most of its con- 
temporaries. Add to this a severe and duti- 
ful sobriety of character which religiously 
kept that brain working when the nearest 
rivals among those contemporaries happened 
to be taking a holiday ; and a gift of " effective 
assertion " (which is our subject's definition 

27 



BERNARD SHAW 

of style), a gift already disciplined to the 
writing of his quartette of voluble novels. 
And add to this again the artless pleasure of 
the undergraduate in mere ratiocination. What 
better field for these things to cut a figure 
in, in the English 'eighties at any rate, than 
that of the economists ? Our subject soon 
was busy cutting it. Within a very small 
number of years he was delivering an address 
to the Economic Section of the British Asso- 
ciation — putting them into their own corner, as 
it were, and saying, " Let me explain." 



IV 

It is not without significance that what Mr. 
Shaw undertook to explain to the economists 
was The Transition to Social Democracy, for 
that is what the members of The Fabian 
Society have been explaining to one another 
ever since. I do not wish, in saying this, to be 
misunderstood. The Fabian Society, a body 
of persons of both sexes who have met together 
once a fortnight for a quarter of a century to 
listen to IMr. Shaw, and have left before his 
speech was over if the duration of its interest 
conflicted with the departure of their train 
for the suburbs, are only of significance to the 
subject of our present study in so far as their 

28 



ECONOMICS 

history is his history. In themselves, and 
apart from the admirable special activities of 
Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb and others of the 
platform figures, they may be described as 
the passionate friends of the unreality of the 
economist. For a quarter of a century they 
have discussed how they will behave, how we 
shall all behave, how they will allow us to 
behave, " under Socialism." It is an amiable 
hobby, like another, and they have pursued 
it with the diligent single-mindedness with 
which another body of persons might discuss 
how vegetables behave under glass. I propose 
to assert that Mr. Shaw the borough councillor, 
the apostle of the cart and trumpet, the cogent 
advocate of municipal trading, has all the 
time been a sufferer from the unreality of the 
economist. He cleared the economists out of 
their corner just as, later on, he cleared the 
dramatists out of the theatre, and for the same 
reason — to make room for some goods of his 
own which he had all ready for delivery. For 
the unreality of the orthodox economists he 
substituted, in the name of reality, a new 
unreality ; just as for the unreality of the 
orthodox dramatists he went on to substitute, 
in the name of reality, a new unreality again. 
But we must not get on too fast. 

What is, in actual fact, the outcome of our 
29 



BERNARD SHAW 

subject's series of treatises — the Fabian Essays 
of 1889, The Impossibilities of Anarchism, 
Socialism for Millionaires, Socialism and 
Superior Brains, Fabianism and the Empire, 
Fabianism and the Fiscal Question, The Com- 
monsense of Municipal Trading, The Case for 
Equality of 1914 ? 

It is a very delightful series, displaying at 
every point the tongue of the ready debater as 
well as the pen of the ready writer. In the 
series, one would say, lives the athletic charm 
of our subject's public figure, as it has talked 
down to its generation from a hundred 
platforms. That, in itself, is very delightful. 
One is sure that the series has been read 
by very many people who have not read 
any other kind of economist at all. They 
have imbibed a very great deal of perfectly 
sound economic theory, and they have not 
imbibed any nonsense. Our subject's first 
effort in this particular field was to offer 
a pronounced opposition to the theory of 
Marx ; partly, no doubt, moved by an instinct 
to throw out of the field the biggest occupying 
figure he found in it ; partly because our 
subject has at any time given really very little 
quarter to other people's nonsense. On the 
subject of Value, he threw out Marx and allied 
himself to the late Mr. Stanley Jevons, an 

30 



ECONOMICS 

orthodox economist. This annoyed the 
SociaHsts ; but Mr. Shaw has always dehghted 
in annoying those people whose attachment 
to an idea is by means of a sentiment. Along 
this line, if it were any part of our immediate 
business, we might discover in him a great 
deal of aesthetic as well as intellectual integrity. 
He annoyed the friends of the little peoples 
by his advocacy, because of its superior 
efficiency, of British ascendancy in South 
Africa ; when the Americanized trust then 
known as the Times Book Club promised 
superior efficiency, he annoyed the friends of 
the freedom of letters by giving the enterprise 
his support. In fact, I suppose our subject 
has always been more than anything else in 
love with efficiency. " Become efficient at 
your own particular trade or profession," has 
been his advice to the young Fabians, " and 
then tell everyone you are a Socialist." That 
has been his policy of peaceful permeation ; in 
contradistinction to the jolly umbrella- shaking 
of Mr. Hyndman amongst the lions in Trafalgar 
Square, and the distinguished hidalgoism of 
Mr. Cunninghame Graham in the same setting. 
It is advice with which it is not possible to 
quarrel. 

And our subject's love of efficiency is the 
real reason why he dislikes the poor so much. 

31 



BERNARD SHAW 

The one actual outcome of all these treatises — 
oh yes, and of a round dozen of prefaces 
which I haven't forgotten — is our subject's 
intense dislike for the poor. That is something 
new in the science of political economy. Be- 
cause it is a very early utterance which remains 
absolutely personal and characteristic, I pro- 
pose to quote here a fairly long passage from 
the Fabian Essays : 

But indeed the more you degrade the workers, 
robbing them of all artistic enjoyment, and all chance 
of respect and admiration from their fellows, the more 
you throw them back, reckless, on the one pleasure and 
the one human tie left to them — the gratification of 
their instinct for producing fresh supplies of men. 
You will applaud this instinct as divine until at last 
this excessive supply becomes a nuisance : there 
comes a plague of men ; and you suddenly discover 
that the instinct is diabolic, and set up a cry of 
" over population." But your slaves are beyond 
caring for your cries : they breed like rabbits ; and 
their poverty breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, 
disease, obscenity, drunkenness and murder. In 
the midst of the riches which their labour piles up 
for you, their misery rises up too and stifles you. 
You withdraw in disgust to the other end of the town 
from them ; you set your life apart from theirs by 
every class barrier you can devise ; and yet they 
swarm about you still : your face gets stamped with 
your habitual loathing and suspicion of them : your 

32 



ECONOMICS 

ears get so filled with the language of the vilest of 
them that you break into it when you lose your self- 
control : they poison your life as remorselessly as 
you have sacrificed theirs heartlessly. You begin to 
believe intensely in the devil. Then comes the terror 
of their revolting ; the drilling and arming of bodies 
of them to keep down the rest ; the prison, the 
hospital, paroxysms of frantic coercion, followed by 
paroxysms of frantic charity. And in the meantime, 
the population continues to increase ! 

And to place against that passage, for your 
edification, I give you another from the 
preface to the Major Barbara of nearly twenty 
years later : 

Now what does this Let Him Be Poor mean ? It 
means let him be weak. Let him be ignorant. Let him 
become a nucleus of disease. Let him be a standing 
exhibition and example of ugliness and dirt. Let 
him have rickety children. Let him be cheap and 
let him drag his fellows down to his price by selling 
himself to do their work. Let his habitations turn our 
cities into poisonous congeries of slums. Let his 
daughters infect our young men with the diseases of 
the streets and his sons revenge him by turning the 
nation's manhood into scrofula, cowardice, cruelty, 
hypocrisy, political imbecility, and all the other fruits 
of oppression and malnutrition. Let the undeserving 
become still less deserving ; and let the deserving lay 
up for himself, not treasures in heaven, but horrors in 
c 33 



BERNARD SHAW 

hell upon earth. This being so, is it really wise to let 
him be poor ? Would he not do ten times less harm 
as a prosperous burglar, incendiary, ravisher or 
murderer, to the utmost limits of humanity's com- 
paratively negligible impulses in these directions ? 
Suppose we were to abolish all penalties for such 
activities, and decide that poverty is the one thing we 
will not tolerate — that every adult with less than, say, 
£365 a year, shall be painlessly but inexorably killed, 
and every hungry half-naked child forcibly fattened 
and clothed, would not that be an enormous improve- 
ment on our existing system, which has already 
destroyed so many civilizations, and is visibly 
destroying ours in the same way ? 

Now the voice of those two utterances is 
demonstrably the same voice, which has gone 
on saying the same things with an iteration 
which cannot possibly be condemned. It is 
the voice, I think, of a man who does not like 
our old world at all, who pushes it away with 
the tips of gloved fingers, with the request 
that it will kindly make itself clean and tidy 
before presenting itself again for attention. 
It is a voice that is attenuated, almost into 
shrillness, by its burden of aesthetic disgust. 
How enormously (we may conceive that voice 
saying) how enormously much more I should 
like you people if you presented a uniform 
face ; a face, above all, that was uniformly 

34 



ECONOMICS 

clean ! Blanche Sartorius, in Mr. Shaw's first 
play, spoke in much this tone when she said : 
" Oh, I hate the poor. At least, I hate those 
dirty, drunken, disreputable people who live 
like pigs." And in one of the latest of Mr. 
Shaw's plays — the play which was on no 
longer ago than the other day — one of the 
statements of a quarter of a century earlier 
was illustrated : the statement that our ears 
get so filled with the language of the vile 
that we break into it when we lose our self- 
control. 

But it is the message, and not the tone, of 
the voice which is to the point for the moment. 
The way to a uniform cleanness of face and of 
character is by means of a uniform income. 
That is Mr. Shaw's economico-psychologic dis- 
covery. That is the actual outcome of our 
subject's series of treatises. It is hinted at in 
Fabian Essays^ ; it is presented for Mr. 
Mallock's consideration in Socialism and 



' At that point in Mr. Shaw's second essay at which it is sug- 
gested that "rent of managerial ability might in course of time 
become negative," that is to say that the manager should receive 
less for his work than the artisan, the captain less than the cabin- 
boy, because, "under Socialism," of the honour of superior service. 
That, in the precise spirit of the undergraduate who suggests to his 
tutor in political economy that interest should be negative — that is 
to say, a payment demanded for capital conserved instead of a pay- 
ment conceded for capital used — is the genesis of Mr. Shaw's 
discovery. 

85 



BERNARD SHAW 

Superior Brains ; it is affirmed in the preface 
to Major Barbara ; it is reaffirmed in The 
Case for Equality, Incomes for All is the one 
positive contribution to the science of political 
economy made by our subject. It is the 
Shavian theory of distribution, as you might 
say the Jevonian theory of value or the 
Ricardian theory of rent. It is the categoric 
alternative to Let Him Be Poor. It is the 
means by which " all the detestable fruits of 
inequality of condition " (see The Impossibili- 
ties of Anarchism) are to be nipped off in the 
bud.i 

1 If this were primarily an economic study we miglit pause to 
see how Mr. Shaw has proved himself to be^ with this single ex- 
ception, an orthodox economist ; or rather, an orthodox economist 
with a Socialist bias — with the orthodox Socialist bias. For 
example, we might read in our Mill : " To make the public pay 
much that the treasury may receive a little, is not an eligible 
mode of obtaining a revenue. In the case of manufactured articles 
the doctrine involves a palpable inconsistency. The object of the 
duty as a means of revenue, is inconsistent with its affording, even 
incidentally, any protection. It can only operate as protection in 
so far as it prevents importation ; and to whatever degree it pre- 
vents importation, it affords no revenue." Now that is precisely 
what Mr. Shaw himself has put forward from one thousand plat- 
forms ; it has been taken to be one of his daringly sudden simplifi- 
cations. That, for example, among other things, is Fabianism and 
the Fiscal question. . . . But this is not primarily an economic 
study. It will not be irrelevant to have noted here our subject's 
pleasure in making any kind of a point, whether it is his own 
or another's ; for that, in its essence, is the debater's pleasure. 
He has done nothing as a constructive economist to be compared 
with Mr. J. A. Hobson's analysis of the industrial system, for 
example. 

36 



ECONOMICS 



What the Fabians discovered, in actual fact, 
was that it was much more amusing to talk 
about Socialism than to achieve it. That has 
very little to do with Quintus Fabius ; but 
we need not trouble ourselves about that. I 
think it was Mr. Chesterton who, having 
taken off his hat to our subject's superior 
brain, took it off again to the fact that our 
subject had devoted his superior brain to talk- 
ing about drain-pipes. Now we may be all for 
taking off our hats to our subject, and yet not 
be unaware that he has enjoyed himself talk- 
ing about drain-pipes. Mr. Shaw has enjoyed 
talking about everything. It is not as though 
Mr. Shaw particularly promised himself the 
pleasure of talking about something else, and 
gave it up in order to talk about drain-pipes 
from a stern sense of duty. The stern sense of 
duty is there plain enough in our subject, but 
I do seriously suggest that we see it in a better 
perspective if we admit that a drain-pipe is a 
peculiarly pleasant thing to juggle with to a 
man of Mr. Shaw's temperament. In the first 
place a drain-pipe is " real," a real solid fact, 
with no nonsensical romance about it ; and 
in the second place there are very few men who 

37 



BERNARD SHAW 

can balance a drain-pipe. No one would have 
expected the late Oscar Wilde, for example, 
to make a very good performance with a drain- 
pipe ; and sure enough when at one point in 
his career he too caught the Fabian fever (for 
he was particularly impressionable, far more 
so than our subject), it was not drain-pipes 
that he wrote about, but the soul of man, 
" under Socialism." 

The Soul of Man under Socialism has not 
hitherto, so far as one is aware, been regarded 
as a Fabian essay ; but that is what it is in 
reality. For the moment, Wilde permitted 
himself the amusement of granting that Utopia 
had, indeed, been added to our dominions ; and 
he made for himself in it, along with the other 
artists, a haven of artificial seclusion in which, 
with beautiful pens and fair white paper before 
him, the artist would sit down and would look 
out over a garden at the high wall which saved 
him from the rude stresses of a competitive 
world, and would produce — one may be quite 
sure, nothing. Now if Mr. Chesterton meant 
that Mr. Shaw would rather have written 
about the place of the artist " under Socialism " 
than about drain-pipes, I think he made a mis- 
take. Did not Mr. Shaw himself write, as 
we shall find in the next chapter, an exposure 
of the current nonsense about artists being 

38 



ECONOMICS 

degenerate ? If artists were not degenerate in 
the highly competitive and distressing year 
1895, after having to put up with all but five 
years of what Mr. Shaw has asserted posterity 
will call " the wicked century," it is surely a fair 
inference that in our subject's opinion Utopia 
is not necessary on their account. As a matter 
of fact, our subject has steadfastly refused to 
talk any of the current nonsense about artists ; 
he has worn his hygienic mantle with the most 
complete absence of affectedness, and that is 
one of the most charming things about him. 
He has put on his gloves and balanced a drain- 
pipe, because — as he has said of the writing of 
prefaces — he can. And when he came to the 
writing of plays, he did not immediately drop 
his drain-pipe, as Wilde dropped his Utopianism 
and submitted himself to the impress of the 
highly competitive West End managers — he 
wrote plays about drain-pipes. 

Our subject, then, has been happy with his 
drain-pipe : that is the precise spectacle pre- 
sented by, let us say. The Commonsense of 
Municipal Trading. If he had not been happy, 
we should not have read it ; and I suppose we 
all have done that. But while Mr. Shaw has 
been busy explaining — with the aid of a great 
deal of sound economic theory, with a wit 
which refuses to be frowned off the field of the 

89 



BERNARD SHAW 

dullards, and with an incurable zest in the 
mere processes and triumphs of debate — the 
precise advantages of the fact that our drain- 
pipes have been municipalized, he has talked 
himself into a curious delusion. He has talked 
himself into the delusion that all this time he 
has been " pointing out " and " clearing up '' 
he has escaped the unreality of the other 
economists. Of Life he has said, " Only by 
intercourse with men and women can we learn 
anything about it " — with the obvious implica- 
tion that it is by this means that he himself has 
learned all about Life. And yet it is the hard 
fact that the Fabian Society and the cart and 
trumpet are not intercourse with men and 
women in the completest of possible senses. 
If we were to take our subject at his 
own valuation, he would appear as one of 
those who, in Plato's phrase, " have gained a 
knowledge of each thing in its reality." By 
becoming elected to a Borough Council one 
gains a knowledge of a Borough Council in its 
reality, and that is admirable ; but one does 
not of necessity gain a knowledge of men and 
women other than Borough Councillors. I 
propose to point the reader to those passages 
quoted on pp. 32, 33, and to assert that they do 
not betray a knowledge of life gained primarily 
by intercourse with men and women. I will 

40 



ECONOMICS 

even go so far as to say that they are the words 
of a man to whom any kind of ordinary mixed 
public intercourse — say, at the Oval, or at a 
Socialist meeting, unless he were on the plat- 
form — would be extremely distasteful. The 
fact is that our subject is a platform figure, 
whose principal intercourse with men and 
women, we should say from his works, has been 
by means of talking about them. 



VI 

We shall find when we come to Mr. Shaw's 
plays, with their machinery of the preface, that 
his procedure is just what we should expect. It 
is an a ^priori procedure, from the general to the 
particular ; from " the millions of poor people, 
dirty people, abject people," for example, of 
whom one reads in the preface to Major Bar- 
bara^ to West Ham, and not vice versa. It is 
as though Mr. Shaw, having written a letter to 
The Times establishing that poverty is a 
crime, had then paid a visit to a Salvation 
Army shelter, and found there everything 
which he had expected to find. His observa- 
tion, that is to say, does not begin with 
Rummy Mitchens, and Snobby Price, and Bill 
Walker ; it begins in the economist's own 
corner, and only condescends, in a humorous 

41 



BERNARD SHAW 

and delightful manner, to make itself concrete 
in Rummy and Snobby and Co. And now 
perhaps it will be as well to substitute for the 
word " economist " the word " publicist." 
Our subject has only sometimes been the 
economist, he has been the publicist all the 
time. In one sense, of course, every artist is a 
publicist ; if he does not find his matter in 
what people happen to be interested in, he 
hopes that people will happen to be interested 
in his matter. But the true publicist, whether 
he is an artist or not, wants to be interesting 
people in his own particular brand of goods all 
the time. If he is an artist, he will interest them 
by means of his art, and he will want to interest 
them outside of his art as well — by means of 
his opinions on every conceivable subject, by 
means of his personality and person, by means 
even of the fact that his telegraphic address is 
" Socialist, London." We may as well sum it 
all up by saying, as our subject has done, " I 
want to change the ideas of the people of this 
country." How that desire and aim consorts 
with artistic principles, how, indeed, it con- 
ditions them, we shall better understand when 
we have devoted a chapter to the aesthetics of 
our subject. But the difference between Mr. 
Shaw and, let us say, Mr. Conrad, is apparent ; 
Mr. Conrad who, when his books have spoken 

42 



ECONOMICS 

for him, really has nothing else that he particu- 
larly wants to tell us, or Mr. James, who has no 
views at all, positively no views at all that any 
reader ever discovered, but only a view of the 
world. The first kind of artist (he who is not 
consciously a publicist) does not understand the 
second kind of artist ; Mr. Conrad has ex- 
pressed this mistrust in his ironic tale of The 
Informer. " Does a man of that — of that — 
persuasion still remain an anarchist when alone, 
quite alone and going to bed, for instance ? 
JDoes he lay his head on the pillow, pull his 
bedclothes over him, and go to sleep with the 
necessity of the chambardement general, as the 
French slang has it, of the general blow-up, 
always present to his mind ? And if so, how 
can he ? " Our subject is not an anarchist — 
has he not pointed out, and explained, and 
generally and sufficiently cleared up, the im- 
possibility of being one ? But our subject is 
all for the chambardement general — oh yes, a 
purely intellectual blow-up, a change of ideas. 
For he is a humane man, who even though he 
wishes that the adult poor might be " in- 
exorably " killed, is yet careful to explain that 
the thing should be " painlessly " done, and 
the orphans forcibly fattened. . . . That is the 
kind of thing we must conceive our subject as 
taking to bed with him, and giving voice to, 

43 



BERNARD SHAW 

with pathos, with humour, and with a variety 
of effective assertion, the next morning. He is 
a man " of that — of that — persuasion." 

There is a penalty for being a pubHcist, and 
that penalty is the publicist's unreality. It 
would be perfectly easy to define the unreality 
of the publicist, to go on defining it (for that is 
what, if it amounts to anything, this chapter 
amounts to) ; but what is the use, since Hazlitt 
has done it already, far better than anyone 
else could possibly do it, in his character of 
Mr. Cobbett ? That passage from On Know- 
ledge of the World may well stand at the end 
of this chapter : 

As I have brought Mr. Cobbett in here by the neck 
and shoulders [says Hazlitt], I may add that I do not 
think he belongs properly to the class, either of 
philosophical speculators, or men of the world. He 
is a political humorist. He is too much taken up 
with himself either to attend to right reason or to 
judge correctly of what passes around him. He 
mistakes strength of purpose and passion, not only 
for truth, but for success. Because he can give fifty 
good reasons for a thing, he thinks it not only ought 
to be, but must be. Because he is swayed so entirely 
by his wishes and humours, he believes others will be 
ready to give up their prejudices, interests and 
resentments to oblige him. He persuades himself 
that he is the fittest person to represent Westminster 
in Parliament, and he considers this point (once 

44 



ECONOMICS 

proved) tantamount to his return. He knows no more 
of the disposition or sentiments of the people of 
Westminster than of the inhabitants of the moon 
(except from what he himself chooses to say or write 
of them), and it is this want of sympathy which, as 
much as anything, prevents his being chosen. The 
exclusive force and bigotry of his opinions deprives 
them of half their influence and effect, by allowing 
no toleration to others, and consequently setting them 
against him. . . . 

A knowledge of mankind ... is less an intellectual 
acquirement than a natural disposition. . . . 

I do not know whether that gave the picture 
of Mr. Cobbett to his contemporaries : it most 
certainly gave, and gives, the picture of one 
kind of man. It gives the picture of the pub- 
licist. One would not wish to make too much 
of the comparison ; when one thinks of the 
subject of this study as a kind of social institu- 
tion, as it were, one thinks of Godwin at least 
as often as one thinks of Cobbett. But per- 
haps he is, as near as we can get to him, the 
Mr. Cobbett of his age— that Mr. Cobbett of 
the pure and trenchant English style who 
wondered how Paradise Lost could have been 
tolerated by a people conversant with as- 
tronomy, navigation, and chemistry, and who 
found some things in Shakespeare to please 
him but much more that he did not like ; that 

45 



BERNARD SHAW 

Mr. Cobbett who was as well known as any 
man in England, down to the minutest circum- 
stances in his character, habits, and opinions, 
including the colour of his waistcoat. Mr. 
Shaw has never stood for Westminster, but he 
has stood for St. Pancras for the County Coun- 
cil. And if one searched one's mind and heart 
for a phrase to cover those activities of our 
subject which this present chapter has feebly 
and hopelessly limped after, " political 
humorist " would be the phrase one would 
come back to. " Because he can give fifty good 
reasons for a thing, he thinks it not only ought 
to be, but must be." 



46 



Ill 

ESTHETICS 



If we have some sort of a perception then, 
however rudimentary, of that " economic 
basis " on which our subject has reared his 
master- works, and of which he has never tired of 
speaking, we may fairly consider we have come 
in on the ground floor, and begin to look out at 
the windows. It is a wide prospect that is 
presented, the whole of which has been sub- 
mitted by our subject to a kind of cadastral 
survey. Our subject has surveyed mankind 
from the Balkans to the Far West, he has 
associated on familiar terms with Napoleon 
after Lodi, with Burgoyne before Saratoga, 
with Caesar in Egypt, with Shakespeare at 
Whitehall, and he has personally conducted 
a party of tourists from Richmond to Hell. 
At least two visions of Heaven he has given 
us, one (in the essay on Church-Going, and 
again from the lips of Tom Broadbent) " a 
drawing-room in blue tabinet " and one the 
dream of a madman. He has written novels 

47 



BERNARD SHAW 

in his nonage, essays in philosophic criticism 
in the lustiness of his manhood, plays in his 
maturity, and prefaces all the time. He 
has made spirited personal sorties against the 
materialism of Marx and of Darwin, and has 
lived to enjoy the spectacle of a world " seeth- 
ing with the reaction of Ibsen's ideas." He has 
run with the Nietzschean hares, and hunted 
with the anti-Nietzschean hounds. He has 
explained the Wagnerian movement in music 
in terms of economic allegory. And goodness 
alone knows what he has not done to the 
collcctivist movement in politics, ethics and 
sociology ! There is only one word for him, 
and that is the word of the hero of the anti- 
romantic comedy : " Wiat a man ! What a 
man ! " 

Now if we were to take some of these activities 
of our subject, and call them artistic, and to 
take other activities of our subject, and call 
them extra-artistic, we should be doing some- 
thing which might be all very well in the case 
of another man — (Sterne, for example, who 
was a preacher of sermons on Sundays and a 
receiver of secular sensations on every other 
day of the week ; or Mr. Walkley, who is an 
assistant to Mr. Hobhouse when he is not giving 
to the drama's patrons the drama's laws) — but 
which would not be the thing in the case of our 

48 



.ESTHETICS 

subject at all. For all the time he has been one 
man, doing the same thing ; and that is the 
secret — the often very well-kept secret — of his 
sincerity. The one thing he has been doing is 
changing the ideas of the people of this country; 
and that is a man's job for a lifetime, with quite 
enough employment to keep him from going 
off duty. 

As a matter of fact, our subject has nothing 
at all to say for a kind of art which does 
not concern itself with a change of ideas. That 
has led him into some strange positions : into 
saying that Sophocles was a great artist, for 
example, because he wrote about incest ; and 
into claiming that Monsieur Brieux is the 
equal of Moliere on the ground that La Foi and 
Les Avaries are exercises in "the highest 
function that man can perform." But in 
general our subject's position is clear ; he has 
told us himself. (He has always told us him- 
self !) "I have, I think," he says, " always 
been a Puritan in my attitude towards Art. 
I am as fond of fine music and handsome 
building as Milton was, or Cromwell, or 
Bunyan ; but if I found that they were 
becoming the instruments of a systematic 
idolatry of sensuousness, I would hold it good 
statesmanship to blow every cathedral in the 
world to pieces with dynamite, organ and all, 
D 49 



BERNARD SHAW 

without the least heed to the screams of the art 
critics and cultured voluptuaries." That is one 
of the most celebrated of our subject's utter- 
ances, and we may behold in it the chambarde- 
ment general again. Mr. Shaw, in the name of 
good statesmanship, in the name of good 
morals, in the name of good economics, has 
blown all sorts of cathedrals to pieces, organ 
and all. Fortunately for us, they have gener- 
ally been bad cathedrals, for Mr. Shaw's critical 
sense, so long as it has been happily employed 
with the dynamite, has been tolerably unerring. 
It is in the cathedrals that have been set up in 
the name of good statesmanship, in the name 
of good morals, in the name of good economics, 
in the name of the religion of the future, in the 
name of anything but good art, and that have 
received his consecration, that the trouble 
comes in. Take the theatre for example — he 
blew the commercially stereotyped idolatry of 
silly sensuousness out of that pretty effectively, 
more effectively than any man of his generation 
(not that it is not still there) ; but he did it in 
order to open it to some strange kind of things 
in the name of the drama. But we shall come 
to all that presently. 

Observe, for the moment, our subject the 
Puritan treading his way through the decadent 
'nineties. The Time Spirit was strong then, we 

50 



ESTHETICS 

are told — strong as the dying hold of a drown- 
ing man. Our subject did not cry for madder 
music and for stronger wine ; he explained the 
economic basis of the Ring of the Niblungs, and 
pointed out the comparative intoxicative values 
in the art of the age of brandy, lager beer, and 
tea. He was not desolate and sick of any old 
passion ; but he gave in to the Time Spirit at 
last, and wrote an essay for the Savoy. And the 
title of that essay was On Going to Church. It 
was a thoroughly Puritan essay. 



II 

Perhaps it is always the part of the Puritan 
to assist in confusing the age-long contention 
between science and art. You may find out 
the man who is not an artist, Mr. Shaw has said, 
by his habit of regarding Art as a " quaint and 
costly ring in the nose of Nature." But Art, if 
you come to think of it, is rather like a quaint 
and costly ring in the nose of Nature — to the 
Puritan. Nature herself can do very well 
without it. The true Puritan demand went to 
America with the Mayflower, and has flourished 
there ever since : it is that you should " deliver 
the goods." Nature delivers her goods ; she is 
not in the least like a poem on Nature. Nature 
was the first Puritan ; and the Souldier's 

51 



BERNARD SHAW 

Catechisme of Cromwell, which presents the 
bare words of command and reply, is -a more 
typically Puritan work than The Pilgrim's 
Proijnss. If Bunyan had been more of a 
Puritan than an artist ho would have written a 
primer on the Christian ethic. For is not the 
scientific primer the archetype of Puritan 
literary expression ? It says what has to be 
said, and is not all else vanity of vanities ? It 
delivers the goods. AVhat is there to be said, in 
strict Puritanism, for the Tolstoy an " infec- 
tion '■ ? AVhat is there, in particular, that can 
possibly differentiate it from the stimulative 
effect of drinking a cup of tea, a noggin of 
brandy, or a glass of lager beer? Mr. Shaw 
asserted in the essay on Church-Going that he 
could do without these things ; but then, art 
is a thing we could do perfectly well without. 
It is the first of the statutory luxuries. Mr. 
Shaw himself, as we have seen, who has ever 
been a lover of art, would himself forgo it in- 
stantly at the behest of good statesmanship. Is 
not the demand that the facts of the primer, the 
assertions of the catechism, should have form 
" put on them " — is not that a weakness of the 
flesh, a givingin to softness, tantamount precisely 
to the tea-drinking ? John Bunyan's Pilgrim's 
Progress, we should say, is better art than 
Mrs. INIary Baker Eddy's Science and Health, 

52 



ESTHETICS 

With a Key to the Scriptures; but the readers of 
the latter work, who are in a state of exaltation 
to begin with, do not say so. They do not want 
to be infected by the literary power of the artist 
before they can surrender themselves to re- 
ceive the goods which the writer has to deliver. 
'J'he Puritan should surely refuse every stimu- 
lant, on the demonstrable ground that he can 
refuse it. And is not the form of a work of art 
simply the most demonstrable stimulant and 
grant in aid to his receptive faculties which the 
Puritan will fmd if he keeps on looking for a 
week of Sundays ? 

These are questions for the Puritan to answer. 
It will be enough for our present purpose if 
their mere posing has served to suggest the 
direction in which we may look for our subject's 
aesthetic theory, and the nature of the basis 
on which the whole superstructure of his 
creative works has been reared. 

Let us take first the question of style. Now 
style, to our Puritan, is, in itself, something 
quite abhorrent : to find pleasure in the style 
of a work of art as apart from its meaning is as 
intolerable as to find pleasure in marriage as 
apart from its offspring. The purpose of 
marriage, as Mr. Shaw has asserted on one 
thousand occasions, is the procreation of 
children : the Book of Common Prayer, in 

58 



BERNARD SHAW 

affirming its secondly and thirdly (and par- 
ticularly its secondly), is a pandar compared to 
him. And the purpose of art, as Mr. Shaw has 
asserted on one thousand further occasions, is 
the procreation of ideas : art is " the living word 
of a man delivering a message to his own time." 
It therefore comes about, in the most natural 
manner in the world, that to Mr. Shaw the 
question of style is the question of effective 
assertion. And that, so to speak, is not a 
question at all ; it admits of no question. If 
you have anything to say to your time, if you 
have any goods to deliver, the value of the 
manner of delivery will be the value of the 
goods, one and inseparable. In a word, 
" Effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and 
Omega of style." But let us have the whole 
passage. It is from the vehemently Puri- 
tanical epistle by means of which Man and 
Superman was dedicated to Mr. Walkley, and 
let us hope in passing that Mr. Walkley en- 
joyed it : 

No doubt I must recognize [says our subject], as 
even the Ancient Mariner did, that I must tell my 
story entertainingly if I am to hold the wedding guest 
spellbound in spite of the siren sounds of the loud 
bassoon. But " for art's sake " alone I would not 
face the toil of writing a single sentence. I know that 
there are men who, having nothing to say and nothing 

54 



ESTHETICS 

to write, are nevertheless so in love with oratory and 
with literature that they delight in repeating as much 
as they can understand of what others have said or 
written aforetime. I know that the leisurely tricks 
which their want of conviction leaves them free to 
play with the diluted and misapprehended message 
supply them with a pleasant parlour game which they 
call style. I can pity their dotage and even sympathize 
with their fancy. But a true original style is never 
achieved for its own sake : a man may pay from a 
shilling to a guinea, according to his means, to see, 
hear, or read another man's act of genius ; but he 
will not pay with his whole life and soul to become a 
mere virtuoso in literature, exhibiting an accomplish- 
ment which will not even make money for him, like 
fiddle playing. Effectiveness of assertion is the 
Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to 
assert has no style and can have none : he who has 
something to assert will go as far in power of style as 
its momentousness and his conviction will carry 
him. . . . 

Now if it were any part of the intention of 
this present slight book — as it is not— to go 
through all that our subject has ever said and 
to substitute our opinion for his own in regard 
to some sentence of it, it might at this point 
be asserted, with or without style but cer- 
tainly with conviction, that to have something 
to say is not at all the same thing as to have the 
power of saying it beautifully. Take the 

55 



BERNARD SHAW 

Speeches which our ministers make up, for 
example, and then foist upon the King to 
dehver ; they have something perfectly plain to 
assert, but they do not always succeed in assert- 
ing it plainly. If they do not bristle with broken 
syntax as a wall with glass, they present, as 
likely as not, some other barrier equally 
insurmountable by those interested. Impos- 
sible to attribute the thing in every instance 
to a lack of conviction. The world is full of 
convinced political enthusiasts who do not 
speak beautifully, of convinced religious en- 
thusiasts who do not preach beautifully, and 
of convinced taxpayers who do not write 
beautiful letters to The Times — as Mr. Shaw 
himself has done, on every occasion. (Those 
letters, in due time, will be well worth collect- 
ing : let us hope that his publishers will collect 
them.) And in every instance for the word 
beautiful you may substitute the word effec- 
tive, without the smallest alteration in sense. 
But it is no part of this book's business, as I 
say, to provide a running commentary on the 
works of Mr. Shaw, or marginally to annotate 
them, as it were, with blessings and curses. It 
is our present intention to detect in those works 
the unifying voice of their creator, and not, as 
soon as he speaks, to out-shout him. And in 
the passage which has just been quoted there 

5Q 



ESTHETICS 

is to be heard, if you listen for it, the essential 
voice of our subject. 

If you choose to call his characteristic 
manner of literary utterance his " style," 
then you have it there : you may observe 
the surface appearance of lucidity on the whole 
of it, and even on that sentence beginning, " I 

know that the leisurely tricks ", although, 

as a matter of fact, if you have not the spirit 
of good fortune at your elbow you will find 
yourself having to read that sentence three 
times before you make out its head from its 
tail. The sentences of our subject have some- 
times this Trinculo-baiting quality (such is the 
power of their conviction). Of course our 
subject is a delightfully good writer, with no 
nonsense about him. But there is a par- 
ticular nemesis which attends upon the writer 
who aims at an exterior appearance of extreme 
lucidity, and that is the achievement of an 
ultimate effect which is the negation of lucidity. 
In Mr. Shaw's case it is entirely a consequence 
of his desire to sweep us along ; and sweep us 
along he does, although at the end of the 
journey we are not always quite perfectly clear 
as to the details of the country through which 
he has carried us. For example, when we read 
in The Revolutionist's Handbook : 

The mere transfiguration of institutions, as from 
military and priestly dominance to commercial and 

57 



BERNARD SHAW 

scientific dominance, from commercial dominance to 
proletarian democracy, from slavery to serfdom, from 
serfdom to capitalism, from monarchy to repub- 
licanism, from polytheism to monotheism, from 
monotheism to atheism, from atheism to pantheistic 
humanitarianism, from general illiteracy to general 
literacy, from romance to realism, from realism to 
mysticism, from metaphysics to physics, are all but 
changes from Tweedledum to Tweedledee : plus fa 
change, plus c'est la mime chose 

— when we read that, a sentence which might 
be recognized at sight as from the pen of our 
subject, we are aware that words are not 
merely being thrown about (as in the case of 
another writer we might have suspected), but 
we are equally aware, if we pause at just that 
point for our breath to rejoin us, that our 
revolutionist no more subscribes to our gram- 
mar than he subscribes to the rest of our con- 
ventions. Sometimes it is a metaphor which 
evades us, as in the flight in which the respec- 
tive qualities of Shakespeare's Caesar and Mr. 
Shaw's are made clear to us : 

The tragedy of disillusion and doubt, of the 
agonized struggle for a foothold on the quicksand 
made by an observation striving to verify its vain 
attribution of morality and respectability to Nature, 
of the faithless will and the keen eyes that the faith- 
less will is too weak to blind : all this will give you a 

58 



ESTHETICS 

Hamlet or a Macbeth, and win you great applause 
from literary gentlemen ; but it will not give you a 
Julius Caesar. 

There are moments, then, in Mr. Shaw's 
writing which one expects are all right ; but 
whether they are all right or not may be left 
to the decision of the literary gentlemen. In 
his zeal for effective assertion, our subject does 
not always spare us some hardship. It is a 
case of he who runs may write, and we who 
read must perforce run after him. If this were 
the proper place for it, we might note a similarly 
occasional hardship inflicted on the excellent 
people whose business and pleasure it is to 
speak our subject's prose in the theatres. " It 
will lay his wife's life waste," is what Sir 
Patrick Ridgeon has to say at a critical junc- 
ture ; and one remembers with indulgence the 
actor who rendered that with several hard-won 
variants. 

But these are merely the occasional defects 
of a style whose qualities are frankly dialecti- 
cal, and, interesting as might prove complete 
essays on the Shavian antithesis and a Shavian 
conjunction, the present chapter is no place 
for them. For now that I have put down on 
paper that passage dedicated to Mr. Walkley, 
it is clear to me that it really has all sorts of 

59 



BERNARD SHAW 

ramifications, some of which lead quite im- 
mediately into the business we are consider- 
ing. Take, for instance, the admission of Mr. 
Shaw that he must tell his story, that he 
must deliver his goods, " entertainingly." You 
will remember the advice given to Don Juan 
later on in the play which, in the author's 
good time, comes after the epistle : the advice 
that he should " put his philosophy in the form 
of entertaining anecdotes." Now it is not 
without significance that that advice is given 
by the Devil. For if we have not been wrong 
in our reading of his character, the Puritan 
does regard the need to be entertaining as the 
Devil. The place where such advice was given 
was not the lowest depth of Hell ; the lowest 
depth of the Puritan's aesthetic Hell is where 
art is made entertaining for art's sake, and 
you will observe that here it is art which is to 
be made entertaining for philosophy's sake — a 
very different thing. But still it is, in strictest 
Puritanism, Hell all the same. For how 
keenly would the Puritan like to deliver the 
goods without the silver paper, the philosophy 
without the anecdote ! — only he dare not do 
it, for fear that the assertion would not be 
" effective." It is like selling a portion of his 
own soul, and he doesn't want to do it. In 
consequence the Puritan sells just that neces- 

60 



AESTHETICS 

sary portion, and keeps a good tight hold on 
the rest. That, really, is the explanation of all 
kinds of things. It is the explanation of Mr. 
Shaw's prefaces, in which he is keeping tight 
hold of his own soul and hating to surrender 
it until the very last moment to the indignity 
of impersonal utterance in the dramatic form ; 
it is the explanation of how, even then, he 
never does quite surrender it ; it is the ex- 
planation, finally, of why the creative works of 
our subject are somehow all secondary to the 
utterances in his own person. To put on the 
form of art is the last indignity, in strict 
reasoning, to the message which Puritanism 
has to deliver ; and that is why the plays of 
Mr. Shaw never quite put it on, as we shall find 
in a subsequent chapter. 



Ill 

To go back to our passage. We have es- 
tablished the contention, for what it is worth, 
that to the Puritan the condescension from 
explicit to implicit utterance does not come 
easily. It is really the second fall. It is a case 
of infacilis est descensus Averno. We are able to 
appreciate the point of view, although not yet 
in its full significance, from which the plays of 
Mr. Shaw are seen to be the plays of a man who 

61 



BERNARD SHAW 

wrote prefaces which no one would read. We 
may even ghmpse him, with the assistance of 
that earher chapter, as an over-serious man 
whose wit is the conscious and rather shame- 
faced reaction against his own over-seriousness. 
We have yet to follow up one more ramification 
from our subject's definition of style as effec- 
tive assertion. Again it is in a direction which 
leads the true Puritan into self-scarification. 
But Mr. Shaw is a Utilitarian-Puritan. Having 
postulated that all that is necessar}'^ to the 
effective expression of one's message to one's 
time is a convinced belief in the originality and 
desirability of that message, he next proceeds 
to add a rider. It appears that to be convinced 
is after all not enough : you must also be 
irritating. " In this world,'' he says, " if you 
do not say a thing in an irritating way, you 
may just as well not say it at all, since nobody 
will trouble themselves about anything that 
does not trouble them." Now to be irritating 
may perfectly well be a Puritan virtue ; it 
will at any rate be a consequence of Puritanism 
so long as there is a majority of non-Puritans 
in this world. But when the advice is here 
given to put your philosophy into an irritating 
form, it is not a case, as it was before, of the 
Devil being his own advocate. Here quite 
plainly it is the Utilitarian in^^Mr. Shaw — the 

62 



ESTHETICS 

Fabian if you like — peacefully permeating 
the Puritan. The Puritan Mr. Shaw knows 
that the pure milk of the word is enough ; 
but the Utilitarian Mr. Shaw says, " Include 
an irritant whenever you get the opportunity." 
We might say that the advice amounted to 
putting a drop of gin in the gingerbeer, if the 
metaphor were not too shocking in this con- 
nection. That anyhow is what Mr. Shaw has 
done, and the Utilitarian has squared it up 
with the Puritan. The probable line the 
Utilitarian took was to point out that, after 
all, the postulate may be taken to include the 
rider ; there can be no true effectiveness of 
assertion, that is to say, without a measure of 
the irritating quality. The Utilitarian would 
have had no difficulty in putting forward 
tolerable analogies. There is Hazlitt's defence 
of the writer, for example ; a defence on 
different ground, but against much the same 
charge of a lapse from absolute sincerity, 
extrinsic as well as intrinsic. " A person," he 
said, " who does not endeavour to seem more 
than he ^5, will generally be thought nothing 
of. We habitually make such large deduc- 
tions for pretence and imposture, that no merit 
will stand against them. It is necessary to set 
off our good qualities with a certain air of 
plausibility and self-importance, as some atten- 

63 



BERNARD SHAW 

tion to fashion is necessary to decency." Well, 
Mr. Shaw having settled his internal differences, 
made up his mind to set off his good qualities 
with a certain — a very certain — air of plausi- 
bility and self-importance. It need not be 
said that he made up his mind very early ; 
quite at the beginning, indeed, of the public 
career we are studying. 

On the other hand, there is David Copper- 
field . "It has always been in my observation of 
human nature," says David Copperfield, " that 
a man who has any good reason to believe in 
himself never flourishes himself before the 
faces of other people in order that they may 
believe in him." Mr. Shaw has yielded to no 
man in his admiration for Dickens (to be sure, 
an un-Puritanical admiration), but it cannot 
be too plainly asserted that in this respect Mr. 
Shaw is outside David Copperfield's observa- 
tion of human nature. With the best of good 
reason to believe in himself, flourish himself 
before the face of other people in order that 
they may believe in him is just what he has 
done. That is the principal form his specific 
of irritation has taken. Indeed you might say 
that that is his style. But here the Puritan, 
who is never far from the Utilitarian's elbow, 
comes in again. The Utilitarian having con- 
ceded this trick of style — the air of plausi- 

64 



ESTHETICS 

bility and self-importance — in the interest of 
effectiveness of assertion, enters the Puritan to 
sanctify the concession ; nay, to acclaim it. 
For in the act of irritation the Puritan has 
discovered not a grace or an expedient, but a 
duty. The Puritan is ready with a whole 
aesthetic of the shocking. You might imagine, 
at first glance, that Major Barbara's use of the 
sacred words or Eliza Doolittle's of the profane 
— to take two instances at random of what has 
been held in our subject's works to be shocking 
— was the work of the Utilitarian ; that they 
were instances of the trick-shocking, things 
said in an irritating way, that is to say, on the 
theory that nobody would trouble themselves 
about Mr. Shaw's particular message if there 
was not something in the manner of that 
message's delivery to trouble them. But if 
you imagine that, the Puritan is soon at hand 
to enlighten you. It is for your good, you will 
learn, that those things are there. It is not 
merely good for you that your ear should be 
caught for the reception of Mr. Shaw's message, 
it is good for you to receive a shock, qua shock. 
The Utilitarian and the Puritan are united 
again ; the value of the goods and the value 
of their manner of delivery once more are one 
and inseparable. 

" The difficulty on the stage at present is 
E 65 



BERNARD SHAW 

not to save audiences from being shocked, but 
to induce managers and actors to shock them 
when it is for their good and that of society 
that they should be shocked, as it generally 
is in England about three times a week on 
one subject or another." ^ Sophocles, Moliere, 
Wagner, Ibsen, Brieux, Strindberg, Mr. Shaw 
— all these distinguished writers are shockers 
in the strict and Puritan sense of that term. 
That was what our subject went to the room 
at Westminster prepared to assert "in an 
irritating way " to the little group of Parlia- 
mentary gentlemen who were sitting on the 
question of the English Dramatic Censor ; and 
that was the Puritan aesthetic by which the 
Parliamentary gentlemen declined to be irri- 
tated. They refused to allow his fifty good 
reasons for the freedom of the theatre to go 
down on their minutes, and that is how we 
come to have the happiness of reading them in 
the form of a preface instead of in the form of 
a Blue Book. 

IV 

But if the happiness has not been Mr. Shaw's 
of contributing to a Blue Book, the happiness 
has been his, as a Puritan, of writing the 

* The Solution of the Censorship Problem. Academy, June 29, 
1907. 

66 



ESTHETICS 

scientific primer. He has delivered the 
goods. The primers of economics we have 
already glanced at, and there are also the 
primers of " philosophic criticism " — The 
Quintessence of Ihsenism (1891), The Sanity of 
Art (1895), The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), and 
the weekly Dramatic Opinions and Essays 
reprinted from the Saturday Review (1895-8). 
In addition, every one of the prefaces is a 
scientific primer : a primer of marriage, a 
primer of medicine, a primer of politics, a 
primer of Shakespeare study, and so on. 
These, I have submitted, for what the theory 
is worth, are the direct delivery of Mr. Shaw's 
message to his own time, while the plays are 
that message's indirect and almost reluctant 
delivery. The primers and the prefaces are 
thus the favourite offspring of our subject, 
while the plays, since they are philosophy in 
the form of entertaining anecdotes, are the 
fruit of a composition with the Puritan's Devil. 
But the primers and the prefaces also contain, 
as we have seen, a concession to the weakness 
of the human flesh ; they consent to address 
us in an irritating way, or, as we should prefer 
to say, they do not refuse to take their author's 
natural wit into alliance. Now that is very 
jolly. " If a habit of jesting lowers a man," 
says Hazlitt, "it is to the level of humanity." 

67 



BERNARD SHAW 

Our subject has altered the title of a famous 
picture, and appears as the Laughing Round- 
head. Perhaps he is the only Puritan in the 
history of that race who has adopted waggery 
as a medium. We may be very glad that he 
has infected us with his jollity ; certainly the 
momentousness of some of the things he has had 
to say to us, even when his conviction is added, 
would not have carried him so far if it were not 
for the natural wit which is part of his style— or, 
as he would prefer us to say, part of his power 
of effective assertion. But we have come to the 
point at which we have to look deeper for the 
evidence of the Puritan. With possibly some 
success we have reconciled the manner of the 
Puritan with the manner of the jester, and 
now it will be our business to look for the 
matter of the Puritan. That will not be 
nearly so difficult. 

We have indulged a fancy that the real 
bent of the Puritan is towards science rather 
than towards art. Now it is a very remarkable 
thing that from the first moment Mr. Shaw 
began to talk about art he talked about it in 
terms of science. In the primer attached to 
his very first volume of plays (a primer of 
Himself) we find our subject deploring on 
Shakespeare's account that that dramatist 
" could not afford to pursue a genuinely 

68 



ESTHETICS 

scientific method in his studies of character 
and society." In the primer attached to his 
Pleasant Plays our subject included a passage 
which is so important to his proper under- 
standing that I propose to reproduce it here : — 

At all events [he said], I do not see moral chaos and 
anarchy as the alternative to romantic convention ; 
and I am not going to pretend I do merely to please 
the people who are convinced that the world is only 
held together by the force of unanimous, strenuous, 
eloquent, trumpet-tongued lying. To me the tragedy 
and comedy of life lie in the consequences, sometimes 
terrible, sometimes ludicrous, of our persistent 
attempts to found our institutions on the ideals 
suggested to our imaginations by our half-satisfied 
passions, instead of on a genuinely scientific natural 
history. 

And with that hint as to what he was driving 
at, our subject withdrew reluctantly and rang 
up the curtain. 

Nor is this all. In the primer attached to 
Man and Superman, Mr. Shaw says, " Every 
man who records his illusions is providing 
data for the genuinely scientific psychology 
which the world still waits for. I plank down 
my view of the existing relations of men to 
women in the most highly civilized society," 
he goes on, " for what it is worth. It is a view 
like any other view and no more, neither true 

69 



BERNARD SHAW 

nor false, but, I hope, a way of looking at the 
subject which throws into the familiar order 
of cause and effect a sufficient body of fact 
and experience to be interesting to you [Mr. 
Walkley], if not to the play going public of 
London." In a word, " I am not a professional 
liar," as Mr. Shaw said in that earlier primer, the 
one attached to the American edition of Love 
Among the Artists. 

The point for the moment is, however, our 
subject's widespread desire for a genuinely 
scientific this, a genuinely scientific that, 
and a genuinely scientific the other. I have 
given three instances, and I have no doubt 
that the reader will have no hesitation in 
providing himself, out of his own superior 
knowledge of our subject, with three dozen 
others. Mr. Shaw has very badly wanted, 
the whole of his life, to turn art into a science. 
And why has he wanted to do that ? For the 
ordinary Puritan reason : that art for its own 
sake is a snare for the mind and a delusion to 
the senses. " The English cry of ' Amuse us : 
take things easily : dress up the world prettily 
for us,' seems mere cowardice to the strong 
souls that dare look facts in the face." You 
will remember what our subject was willing 
to do to the cathedrals, organs and all, in the 
name of good statesmanship ; and there is no 

70 



ESTHETICS 

end to the chamhar dement general he will 
perform in the name of a genuinely scientific — 
that is to say, a genuinely Puritan — system of 
morals. He has taken down the sign of art for 
art's sake, and put up the sign of art for 
science's sake in its place. And what then is 
the enemy, to be attacked in this genuinely 
scientific manner ? The enemy is Romance. 
" I am not a professional liar," says our 
subject, with the implication that that is what 
the other artists are — Sophocles, Moliere, 
Bunyan, Hogarth, Wagner, Ibsen, Butler, 
Strindberg, Tolstoy, and some few others 
excepted. Romance is " the great heresy to 
be swept off from art and life — ^the food of 
modern pessimism and the bane of modern 
self-respect." And Idealism, " which is only 
a flattering name for romance in politics and 
morals," is as obnoxious to our subject as 
romance in ethics or religion. Away with 
them : forward with a genuinely scientific 
psychology. 

How Mr. Shaw proceeded to put these prin- 
ciples into practice, with what skill he has put 
the Romantic Idealist into the position of the 
enemy and kept him there, in what degree he 
has managed to fall himself into the pit he 
had digged for his enemy, we shall read in a 
subsequent chapter. In the meantime we find 

71 



BERNARD SHAW 

our subject asserting, " The function of comedy 
is nothing less than the destruction of old- 
established morals." That is precisely what 
we should expect our subject to assert. What 
kind of a comedy that principle led to, what 
kind of a tragedy and comedy of life has lain 
in the sometimes terrible and sometimes ludi- 
crous consequences of our persistent refusal to 
be genuinely scientific, it will be our business 
in due course to consider. But there is one 
other principle which has gone to make the 
shape of our subject's dramatic work, and I 
suppose the proper place for it is the present 
chapter. 



A great deal has been made of the indebted- 
ness of our subject to the late Samuel Butler ; 
but then a great deal has been made of the 
indebtedness of our subject to a good many 
people. The fact that the superman of our sub- 
ject is not in the least like the superman an- 
nounced by Zarathustra, the fact that the drama 
of our subject is not in the least like the drama 
of Ibsen, the fact that the philosophy of our 
subject is not in the least like the philosophy of 
Schopenhauer — all these facts will not for one 
moment put a stop to the current habit of 
putting forward Nietzsche, Ibsen or Schopen- 

72 



ESTHETICS 

hauer as petitioning creditor in the alleged 
intellectual bankruptcy of our subject. And 
Mr. Shaw, on purely technical grounds, is not 
in the least like the late Samuel Butler, 
in that the late Samuel Butler put the 
whole of his satire into a single work of 
art while Mr. Shaw has never chosen to put 
the whole of his satire into a work of art, but 
has left the bulk of it hanging out in a preface. 
The late Samuel Butler planked down his view 
of the existing relations of men to women in 
the most highly civilized society in the form of 
a novel, and he called that novel The Wa}^ of 
All Flesh. If the whole of the Notebooks of 
Butler had never been published, it really 
would not have mattered to the completeness 
of our understanding of that view. But when 
our subject planks down his Man and Super- 
man, the notebook at the end and the notebook 
at the beginning and the notebook in the middle 
are found to be really essential to our complete 
understanding. If anybody doubts that, he 
has only to remember the popular play of that 
name as performed in the theatres, with its 
unmistakable appearance of being a comedy 
which has left its philosophy in the cloak-room. 
Butler, that is to say, in so far as he was 
concerned with a " message," delivered that 
message in the form of a work of art, while Mr. 

73 



BERNARD SHAW 

Shaw has never quite brought himself to that 
ultimate betrayal of the Puritan principle. Mr. 
Shaw has confessed to the highest possible enjoy- 
ment of Butler, an enjoyment which he has 
done a great deal to bring this present generation 
to share. If any very portentous claim were 
to be marked out on Mr. Shaw's behalf around 
the view point from which he has regarded 
English society, it might be necessary to 
remark that the late Samuel Butler had been 
there before him. But if the question is that 
of " likeness " in method between the two 
writers, it is only possible to find them essen- 
tially and irretrievably divided. Between 
The Way of All Flesh, regarded as a novel, and 
Man and Superman^ regarded as a play, there 
is all the difference between the satiric method 
which is implicit and the satiric method which 
is explicit ; between the view of life which is 
" planked do^\Ti," that is to say, in the sense that 
a plank may be built into a structure, and the 
view of life which is "planked down" in the 
sense that a plank may be one step to a 
platform. 

If we must be in the fashion, however, and 
talk about likenesses, let us see how our 
subject (not is influenced by, or indebted to, 
but) has some points of contact with William 
Godwin, the inquirer concerning Political Jus- 

74 



ESTHETICS 

tice, and the father-in-law of the poet Shelley. 
The circumstance that both are by way of being 
novelists and dramatists, the one more of the 
one and the other more of the other, is the least 
part of the parallel. It is more to the point that 
both are rather reluctantly so, each in the 
intervals from being generally and calmly 
subversive. Godwin's " Beware of reverence " 
is extremely like the guiding principle of our 
subject. " Marriage as now understood," said 
Godwin, " is a monopoly and the worst of mon- 
opolies." And when he said, "Morality itself 
is nothing but a calculation of consequences," 
he really came very near to Mr. Shaw's 
" morals being mostly only social habits and 
circumstantial necessities " — an utterance 
which is to-day, I suppose, far more famous. 
But none of these things is the point. We 
come nearer the point when we remember the 
failure of Godwin's one excellent novel to 
achieve the implicit satire of things as they 
were which was its object. He actually called 
his novel Things As They Are, very much as 
Butler called his The Way of All Flesh ; and 
posterity has called it ever since by its sub- 
title, which was The Adventures of Caleb 
Williams. Now why has posterity called 
Godwin's quite excellent novel by its sub- 
title ? Simply because the author's purpose — 

75 



BERNARD SHAW 

which was, as he explained in a preface, to 
" comprehend a general review of the modes 
of domestic and unrecorded despotism by 
which man becomes the destroyer of man " — 
never quite succeeded in imposing itself on the 
narrative : it got left in the preface. The 
consequent occasional inassimilability of the 
narrative, due to the fact that the very 
explicit philosopher of Political Justice is 
not quite completely forgotten, is the sole 
reason why Caleb Williams is a fiction of the 
second rank. It is surprising that Mr. Shaw, 
whose eagerness to explain English literature 
to us has been at least the equal of his other 
eagernesses, has not, so far as one remembers, 
ever said anything about the author of Caleb 
Williams and his once even more celebrated 
Inquiry. Once again, however, our surprise 
at this circumstance is not the point : the sole 
and only point of which I wish to make any- 
thing at all in this connection is that Godwin 
did happen to enunciate quite perfectly the 
principle which has animated our subject in all 
his activities. He did not enunciate it as an 
aesthetic principle, but that is what our subject 
has made of it. From the blameless seclusion 
of his library Godwin looked out at the world 
and said : " What I should desire is, not by 
violence to change its institutions, but by 

76 



ESTHETICS 

discussion to change its ideas." And from the 
blameless seclusion of his platform, that is 
exactly what our subject has said. 



VI 

You will read in The Quintessence of Ibsenism 
of the consequences, sometimes terrible and 
sometimes ludicrous, of a conduct of life 
founded on the ideas which at present rule in 
the world. That work was the first, and it still 
is the principal, primer of that subject. But 
our purpose in turning to it at this precise 
point is not so much for general edification as 
for particular illumination. We want to know, 
I take it, just what our subject's major aesthetic 
principle amounts to in regard to the drama. 
When Mr. Shaw put his little work forward for 
the first time in the year 1891 he did so with 
a reminder that it was not a critical essay on 
the poetic beauties of Ibsen — (as this present 
slight book is, for example, a critical essay on 
the poetic beauties of Mr. Shaw) — but simply 
an exposition of Ibsenism ; or an exposition of 
just so much in Ibsen as suited Mr. Shaw's 
purposes, as we should prefer to say. When 
Mr. Shaw put the work forward for the second 
time in the year 1913, he newly completed it 
to the death of Ibsen and he played just the 
same trick upon him. He triumphantly found 

77 



BERNARD SHAW 

embedded in his subject, that is to say, not this 
time his own opinions in general (they remained 
as before) but the aesthetic principle on which 
he had written his own plays. He called the 
chapter in which he performed this feat The 
Technical Novelty in Ibsen's Plays. And this 
is the manner of it : — 

This, then, is the extension of the old dramatic 
form effected by Ibsen. Up to a certain point in the 
last act, A Doll's House is a play that might be turned 
into a very ordinary French drama by the excision of 
a few lines, and the substitution of a sentimental 
happy ending for the famous last scene : indeed the 
very first thing the theatrical wiseacres did with it 
was to effect exactly this transformation, with the 
result that the play thus pithed had no success and 
attracted no notice worth mentioning. But at just 
that point in the last act, the heroine very unexpect- 
edly (by the wiseacres) stops her emotional acting and 
says : " We must sit down and discuss all this that 
has been happening between us." And it was by this 
new technical feature ; this addition of a new move- 
ment, as musicians would say, to the dramatic form, 
that A Doll's House conquered Europe and founded 
a new school of dramatic art. 

Now it would be perfectly possible, indeed it 
would be the easiest thing in the world, to say 
several things at this point. It would be easy, 
for example, to point out that since Nora's next 

78 



ESTHETICS 

remark is that this is their first discussion in 
eight years, all of Mr. Shaw's plays cannot 
possibly consist of discussion without running 
the Technical Novelty to disaster. It would be 
even easier to ask, since the scene between 
Isabella and Claudio in the prison or Orlando 
and Rosalind's interchange of remarks in the 
forest is certainly, each in its separate kind, a 
" discussion," in what respect the Technical 
Novelty is a novelty. One might even assert, 
with a reasonable expectation of escaping 
contradiction, that A Doll's House happens to 
be a play which as logically requires this 
particular discussion for its artistic completion 
as the preparations of the hen require to 
eventuate in the egg. The story of Torvald 
and Nora is a story whose climax is a discus- 
sion as inevitably as the story of Othello and 
Desdemona is a story whose climax is a murder. 
It is no more sensible to say that all plays must 
be discussions because A Doll's House is a play 
about a discussion, than it would be to say 
that all plays must be about murders because 
Othello is a play about a murder. ... But 
we will assert none of these things. We happen 
not to be discussing the point with our sub- 
ject, but noting his own triumphant discovery 
of it. The drama is discussion. It is discus- 
sion with one end and one only, and that end is 
a public change of ideas. Its word is Pistol's : 

79 



BERNARD SHAW 

" Discuss unto me." That is what Mr. Shaw 
has Hved for, and worked for, and jested for, 
and sold himself to the Puritan's Devil for. 
That is why Mr. Shaw has addressed us from a 
thousand platforms, including the theatre plat- 
form. That, indeed, is the reason why Mr. 
Shaw had to carry that particular platform at 
the point of the pen snatched from the hand of 
the inert dramatic critics : to wrest it from the 
amusement-caterers, from all the horde of pro- 
fessional liars, and to devote it to its high and 
sacred purpose. In the light of that discovery, 
we do not any longer hesitate to understand the 
sense in which the function of comedy is the 
destruction of old-established morals. It is no 
longer with surprise that we hear that Shake- 
speare was a poor sort of a dramatist, with 
much to show and nothing to teach — not one, 
in a word, of the artist-philosophers. Do we 
not read in this same primer, newly completed 
as it is to the death of Ibsen, that Othello 
" would be a prodigiously better play if it were 
a serious discussion of the highly interesting 
problem of how a simple Moorish soldier got 
on with a supersubtle Venetian lady of fashion 
if he married her " ? We do. And with that 
hint as to what our subject has been driving at, 
we really may withdraw and let him ring up 
his curtain. 

80 



IV 

DRAMATICS 

Mr. Shaw's novels are four, and Mr. Shaw's 
plays are twenty-seven up to the present. His 
novels are not marked by any of the specific 
qualities which are held in our day to distinguish 
the modern novel ; nor are his plays marked 
by any of the specific qualities which are held 
to distinguish the modern play. But when we 
have said that we are only at the beginning of 
the task of this present chapter, and not at the 
end of it. 



It has been a favourite thing with the latter- 
day publicists to assert that the only reason 
why all the great writers have not favoured 
the theatre is that the theatre has been 
unworthy of them. That is a very fair instance 
of the unreality of the publicist. Starting, 
perhaps, with the moral desire, or the politi- 
cal desire, or the intellectual desire, to abolish 
the Censorship, they have pressed this argu- 
ment among others into their service. There 
F 81 



BERNARD SHAW 

may be some basis of fact for the argument 
to rest upon, but one does not fancy it to 
be n very secmv basis. This is the sort of 
a priori argument that may spring fully 
armed from the head of the born publicist on 
any day o( the Aveek. The publicist, having 
conceived it. will straightway address all the 
writers of novels with a question as to why they 
are not writers of plays also or writers of plays 
instead ; and all the writers of novels, hating 
to disappoint their counsel particularly when 
his leading question is in a flattering sense, will 
straightway reply that the existence of a 
dramatic censorship is positively the only 
reason why they are not all writers of plays. 
There is no harm done, no harm whatsoever; 
but you might just as well address a question to 
all the writers of plays and ask them why they 
are not all writers of novels. If you did, they 
might reply that they wrote for the theatre 
because it was the vastest reservoir of Art, 
or with some other Hugoist rhetoric ; or they 
n\ig]\t reply that they made more money at it, 
which would probably be true. But if they 
were quite completely honest they would reply 
that they wrote what they could and thanked 
God for their sustenance. 

All this is entirely without reference to the 
question of the Censorship, which the reader 

82 



DRAMATICS 

may sufficiently study in the works of our sub- 
ject if he happens to be interested. It is not, 
however, without reference to our subject. 
Mr. Shaw is a writer who might equally well 
have taken to the novel or the play. He is 
one of the few artists of undoubted eminence 
whom one can picture as determining the 
form of art to adopt by the toss of a coin — 
(if that were not in itself, of course, an un- 
economic procedure). Perhaps he did toss 
up, and it came down heads for the novel. 
Well, he wrote four novels ; and then he 
tossed up again and it came down tails for 
the play, and he has written plays ever since. 
And he has not only written plays ever since, 
but he has been a notable cause of plays in 
others. Really his is the attitude that Carlyle 
or Mill or anybody else might have written 
plays if they had wanted to. I do not think that 
Mr. Shaw has ever lent himself to the humour- 
less nonsense by which it is made out that the 
reason why Carlyle and Mill did not write plays 
was because Mr. William Bodham Donne or 
somebody would not let them. But what he 
has lent himself to is the modern movement 
for evoking plays from anybody and everybody, 
on the ground that a play is rather a jolly sort 
of thing to write. That is the genesis, for 
example, of the Incorporated Stage Society. 

83 



BERNARD SHAW 

One really is not certain that one has not 
heard our subject boasting that it was he who 
set off Lady Gregory a-play-writing at her 
time of life ; or if he has not done that, 
he has claimed her in some fashion for that 
paradise for artists which Social Democracy 
is to be, in which none of us shall consume any 
happiness without making as much as we 
consume. All this is very charming in our 
subject ; for there is no quality so rare as the 
willingness to admit that the particular talent 
which distinguishes us is equally present in our 
friends. 

Now the one thing, we may be sure, our 
subject would not do with his talent would be 
to bury it. If you ask me the precise point at 
which he determined to re-invest it — to with- 
draw it from the novel, that is to say, and to 
put it into plays — I am afraid I am not ready 
with my answer. One thing, I think, is certain, 
and that is that Mr. Shaw was not a dramatist 
by predestination. Nor in any ordinary sense 
did the hour make the man. There was not a 
theatre waiting in London for the plays of Mr. 
Shaw as, later on, there was a theatre waiting 
in Dublin for the plays of Lady Gregory. The 
whole history of Mr. Shaw's connection with the 
theatre in a critical capacity is the history of 
his efforts to turn the then occupiers out ; 

84i 



DRAMATICS 

and, having turned them out, he went into 
occupation himself rather from a sense of duty 
than because the theatre made any particu- 
larly irresistible appeal to him as an eligible 
residence. It was good enough for his purpose ; 
he was a clever enough man to capture it, and 
a clever enough man to make a perfectly good 
show in it when it was his. More than this, the 
theatre did happen to provide a natural outlet 
for the most specific of Mr. Shaw's talents. Our 
subject was born a talker. In one of his early 
novels a young lady objects to the modern 
novel that it is all talk. Certainly the novels of 
our subject are not quite all talk — they would 
be even more enjoyable if they were. They 
are the novels of a very young man who could 
not find in the home-circle or the debating 
society an audience wide enough for the many 
ideas with which he was bursting. In them- 
selves they are the strangest things, these 
novels, filled with people whose existence 
and identity it is much easier to forget than 
to remember, until in dialectical combats 
they come to sudden unaccountable life. The 
author himself has confessed to the greatest 
difficulty, while he was writing them, in 
remembering what they were meant to be 
about ; and it is impossible for the reader not 
to have sympathy with him. 

85 



BERNARD SHAW 



II 

The novels of Mr. Shaw's nonage are The 
Irrational Knot (1880), Love Among the Artists 
(1881), Cashel Byron's Profession (1882), and 
An Unsocial Socialist (1883). 

When one says that one does not remember 
what is in the novels of Mr. Shaw's nonage, of 
course one does not mean that there was not 
an idea in them. Of course the idea of the 
first of them was that marriage was all wrong ; 
of the second, that the conventional apprecia- 
tion of art was all wrong ; of the third, that 
modern prize-fighting was all wrong (although 
neither we nor the author minded that in the 
least) ; and of the fourth, that everything was 
all wrong (not that, while we were reading 
A7i Unsocial Socialist, we minded that very 
much either). For their narrative method 
was as follows : Mr. Shaw's carefully un- 
conventional hero has just lost his wife (in 
a scene of carefully calculated unconven- 
tionality) and, in the face of the family's 
assurance that " Death is a serious thing," 
he agrees to put up a tombstone : — 

Trefusis now encountered a difficulty. He wished 
to pay the mason the just value of his work, no more 

86 



DRAMATICS 

and no less. But this he could not ascertain. The 
only available standard was the market price, and this 
he rejected as being fixed by competition among 
capitalists who could only secure profit by obtaining 
from their workmen more products than they paid 
them for, and could only tempt customers by offering a 
share of the unpaid-for part of the products as a 
reduction in price. Thus he found that the system 
of withholding the indispensable materials for pro- 
duction and subsistence from the labourers, except 
on condition of their supporting an idle class whilst 
accepting a lower standard of comfort for themselves 
than for that idle class, rendered the determination of 
just ratios of exchange, and consequently the practice 
of honest dealing, impossible. . . . 

and so on, and so on. It is no wonder that the 
personal drama of Mr. Shaw's novels shrinks in 
the memory. Our economist-novelist's treat- 
ment of the final theme was so thorough that 
it was only by means of appending a letter from 
the principal character to the author that he 
could get rid of the impression which was rife 
among his readers that Socialism was all wrong ; 
readers, too, who were Socialists every one of 
them, by reason of the periodical in which 
the novel made its first or serial appearance. 
Thus the probable truth is, or one possible way 
of expressing the probable truth would be to 
say, that these novels had not got any tech- 

87 



BERNARD SHAW 

nique. Perhaps it was that our young man 
was too intent on the " ideas " he was propa- 
gating — (mainly, it is true, among pubhshers' 
readers, a class that is greatly in need of them) 
— ^to spare much attention to the form of his 
anecdotes. 

That is why, at an earlier stage of these 
proceedings, these novels were described as 
nearly negligible. But not quite. It would 
be impossible to neglect them for the reason, if 
there were no other reason, that they are the 
practising ground, not only of the economist, 
but of the dramatist. Their mode of expres- 
sion is facile but various. They are at one 
moment like the " realistic " novels of Mr. 
George Moore (with which they were closely 
contemporary), rather like Wilde the next 
moment, and exactly like Dickens the moment 
after that. But at certain moments they are 
like nothing at all but our subject's own plays. 
These are always the moments of more ani- 
mated discussion. Suppose we try the simple 
experiment of taking one of these novels, of 
opening it quite at random, and then of trans- 
posing the dialogue from the narrative form 
into the dramatic. This would be the kind of 
result : — 

Agatha. Do marry me, Mr. Trefusis. Pray do. 
Trefusis {determinedly). Thank you. I will. 

88 



DRAMATICS 

Agatha. I am very sure you shan't. {She gathers her 
skirt as if to run away.) You do not sup- 
pose I was in earnest, do you ? 

Trefusis. Undoubtedly I do. / am in earnest. 

Agatha. Take care. I may change my mind and be in 
earnest, too ; and then how will you feel, 
Mr. Trefusis ? 

Teefusis. I think, under our altered relations, you had 
better call me Sidney. 

Agatha. I think we had better drop the joke. It was 
in rather bad taste, and I should not have 
made it, perhaps. 

Trefusis. It would be an execrable joke ; therefore I 
have no intention of regarding it as one. 
You shall be held to your offer, Agatha. 
Are you in love with me ? 

Agatha. Not in the least. Not the very smallest bit in 
the world. I do not know anybody with 
whom I am less in love or less likely to be 
in love. 

Trefusis. Then you must marry me. If you were in love 
with me, I should run away. 

Now is not that sufficiently like a scene 
between Valentine and Gloria, between Tanner 
and Miss Wliitefield, between Charteris and 
Julia, to justify us in our experiment ? Let us 
pursue it a little further. 

Our subject was born a talker, but he came 
into this world, like his own Cokane, with the 
pen of ready writer. The dramatic form offers 
every advantage with regard to dialogue that 

89 



BERNARD SHAW 

is offered by the form of the novel ; indeed it 
has the superior advantage in this respect that 
a play is, if superficially regarded, nothing but 
talk. That might appear to cut off from the 
dramatist the pleasant opportunities for de- 
scriptive writing — for knocking off in a few 
well-chosen words a scene or a character. But 
our subject soon got over that : he made 
opportunities in his plays for just such descrip- 
tive pieces as these early novels show him to 
have the knack of. Take Mr. Jansenius in An 
Unsocial Socialist. '' Having discovered early 
in his career that his dignified person and fine 
voice caused people to stand in some awe of 
him, and to move him into the chair at public 
meetings, he has grown so accustomed to 
deference that any approach to familiarity or 
irreverence disconcerts him exceedingly." Or 
Mrs. Douglas in The Irrational Knot. " Sholto's 
mother is a widow lady older than Mr. Lind, 
with a rather glassy eye and shaky hand, who 
would look weak and shiftless in an almshouse, 
but who, with plenty of money, unlimited 
domestic service, and unhesitating deference 
from attendants who are all trained artists in 
their occupation, makes a fair show of being a 
dignified and interesting old lady." That is 
what we read in the novels, with the sole 
and the single exception that, for the pur- 

90 



DRAMATICS 

poses of our demonstration, the tense has been 
altered. 

It is the same with the pieces of scenic de- 
scription. This account of a room, for ex- 
ample : " The walls are whitewashed, and at 
about four feet from the ground a dark band 
appears, produced by pencil memoranda and 
little sketches scribbled on the whitewash. 
One end of the apartment is unfurnished, 
except by the gymnastic apparatus, a photog- 
rapher's camera, a ladder in the corner, and 
a common deal table with oil cans and paint 
pots upon it. At the other end a comparatively 
luxurious show is made by a large bookcase, an 
elaborate combination of bureau and writing- 
desk, a rack with a rifle, a set of foils, and an 
umbrella in it, several folio albums on a table, 
some comfortable chairs and sofas, and a thick 
carpet under foot. Close by, and seeming 
much out of place, is a carpenter's bench with 
the usual implements and a number of boards 
of various thicknesses." 

That is the novelist's account of it, after his 
tense has been transposed into the historic or 
dramatic present. And is not that just pre- 
cisely the account of numberless interiors 
which our subject, unwilling to surrender any 
of the enjoyable liberties of the novelist, has 
put into the mouth of those supernaturally 

91 



BERNARD SHAW 

c 

observant sparrows on the window-sill who 
are wont to impart his stage directions 
to us ? 



Ill 

When Mr. Shaw came back to The Irrational 
Knot not long ago in order to write a preface 
about it, he found, on venturing to look into 
the book, that it was " a fiction of the first 
order." Its morality, that was to say, was 
original and not ready-made. We have not 
paused, I am afraid, very long over the 
morality of the novels of Mr. Shaw's nonage ; 
but we may say at this point, for the better 
understanding of those who do not know 
those novels, or whose memory has not suc- 
ceeded in holding their substance (as Mr. 
Shaw confesses that his own has not), that 
The Irrational Knot is the story of the marriage 
of a plebeian expert in electrical dynamics with 
the niece of an earl. (One thinks that Marian 
was the niece of the earl, but would not like 
to be sure.) Conolly's principal business in 
the book is being rude to everybody — that of 
an uncivil engineer, as you might say ; he is 
the enfant terrible of Mr. Shaw's literary and 
dramatic machinery, first cousin of the Welsh 
composer in the novel about the artists and 

92 



DRAMATICS 

of Trefusis, the Unsocial Socialist, and first 
cousin once removed from the long fam<*| of 
John Tanner. He marries Marian, who leaves 
him, and flies to America with another. There 
— where one does not believe his creator, on 
evidence either internal or external, to have 
been — one remembers a particularly resolute 
handling of the end made by Conolly's sister, 
who was of the variety profession, and jvho 
had, unfortunately, taken to drink. The 
two women found themselves, in the large 
city of New York, occupying adjacent floors 
in the same boarding house — that earliest of 
Mr. Shaw's " coincidences " one remembers, 
although what the scene of the death of the 
engineer's sister can have been doing in the 
novel is not certain, unless it was to provide 
the author with his earliest opportunity of 
being resolute in the face of death. After- 
wards, when Marian was rather expecting 
him to take her back, Conolly turned on his 
heel and left her with an epigram, an incident 
that one faintly remembers to have been the 
best in the book. At any rate, The Irrational 
Knot was a fiction of the first order in the sense 
that it was " an early attempt on the part of 
the Life Force to write A Doll's House in 
English by the instrumentality of a very 
immature writer aged twenty-four." Now 

93 



BERNARD SHAW 

that was not very economical of the Life 
Fo( ^, since A Doll's House had been written 
already in Norwegian, and there was Mr. 
William Archer standing by ready to translate 
it. Torvald and Nora might have joined in 
the chorus of the lost boys in Sir James 
Barrie's pantomime, and have told the Life 
Force that they had been " made before." 
They had been made before and, the particular 
point is, they had been made differently. For 
however Mr. Shaw may dazzle our intelligences 
with a pure pedigree for the form of his drama 
by the Time Spirit out of Ibsen, the fact 
remains that no two dramatists, in every 
technical respect, are greater strangers to one 
another. Mr. Shaw, by implication, has offered 
us the common ground between Ibsen's Torvald 
and Nora and his own Conolly and Marian as 
a suitable field for comparison ; but, not- 
withstanding the fact that we have established 
a certain general kinship between the novels of 
our subject and his plays, we may prefer a 
field where a more direct comparison is possible. 
Take Ghosts and Mrs. Warren's Profession^ 
for example. You may read Ghosts, or you 
may witness it, and never for a moment be 
aware that anything at all is being " discussed " 
in Mr. Shaw's sense of the word. The one thing 
that will strike you, if you happen to think about 

94* 



DRAMATICS 

it, is the enormous pains the dramatist has been 
at to personalize his problem. Indeed pro^ii^ m, 
qua problem, is the last thing that would 
suggest itself in regard to this drama, so careful 
has the dramatist been to merge the intellectual 
in the emotional, the general in the particular. 
There is nothing, positively nothing at all, in 
the material of the drama which is not caught 
up and sufficiently conveyed in Oswald's ^two 
utterances, " What sort of life have you given 
me ? " and " I shall never be able to work 
again." Each of those moments is, in its 
turn, tremendously moving, and why ? — 
simply because every ounce of the dramatist's 
strength has gone into the work of preparing 
those moments. 

Now our subject has publicly decried the 
work of dramatic preparation. It may, he 
says, " be left to those infortunate play- 
wrights who, being unable to make any- 
thing really interesting happen on the stage, 
have to acquire the art of continually per- 
suading the audience that it is going to 
happen presently." In his primer of Ibsenism 
he omitted to make the one point that may be 
made against Ibsen, indeed that must be made 
in any examination that is even decently 
technical : namely, that his anxiety to give 
pictorial representation to his dramatic mo- 

95 



BERNARD SHAW 

lives (his so-called " symbolism ") is carried 
to (>» :h lengths as to retard the imaginative 
acceptance of his works instead of facili- 
tating it. Thus the excesses of the late 
Mr. Alving must have their actual and 
concrete memorial, by a rather cumbersome 
irony, in a Home for Orphans ; the Home for 
Orphans must be uninsured in order, by an 
iror ^ equally cumbersome, to hoist the good 
Pastor with his own petard when it catches fire 
as a result of his prayer-meeting ; and the 
lurid light of the building in flames must 
visibly illumine the theme that " everything 
is burning " as five minutes later the light of 
dawn must do the same service for Oswald's 
demand for the sun. It was not necessary to 
have the drama of Hauptmann and Tchekov 
before we might make the discovery that all this 
superior stage ''business" is not in the least 
essential to the real drama of Ghosts. Not only 
is it not essential, not only would the play be a 
perfectly good play in the theatre without it, 
the play would be a better play, since it is the 
property of imaginative aids, if carried beyond 
a certain point, to become a hindrance instead of 
a blessing. It is the consciousness of all this 
dexterity which is the disturbance ; Ibsen's is 
not quite completely the art which conceals art. 
It is the same with the death of Hedwig ; the 

96 



DRAMATICS 

pathos of that most moving scene is not really 
assisted by its elaborate compliance w.itPthe 
ritual of the wild duck in the attic. It is the 
same with the Master Builder, at the end of 
which play it really seems to have been Ibsen's 
wish that his audiences should visibly and 
actually see a human body falling from a 
church-tower — a piece of stage business at 
which a whole generation of English rtage 
producers, who have as a rule no parucular 
misgivings with regard to this kind of thing, 
have quailed. This kind of thing finally got 
such a hold of him that he wrote a play in 
which, in order that we might properly 
appreciate what he was getting at, it was 
necessary that we should sit by while hal^ the 
characters were carried away in an avalanche ; 
and the irony of the situation is that Ibsen's 
" symbolism " really took its rise in nothing at 
all but his desire to reduce everything within 
terms of the theatre. 

But now for Mrs. Warren's Profession. You 
may admire that play as much as you Dlease, 
you may praise its author for the good ne has 
done, for the pleasure his intellectual indig- 
nation has given you, or for the sometimes 
humorous and always spirited quality of the 
dialogue ; the fact remains that in it he has 
done exactly what he defined Ibsenism as 
G 97 '^ 



m; 



BERNARD SHAW 

doing, but what Ibsen did not do, and that is 
he hr'made Society the principal protagonist 
in the drama. There is not a word in Ghosts 
of abstract or theoretic discussion : not the 
smallest suggestion that the fixture of the 
evening is Mr. Ibsen versus The Social System. 
Here are five people, it says ; from their 
action and interaction in the twelve hours 
the ■ 'amatist has chosen you may take 
away.V'vvhat you will in pleasure or profit. 
Really, if Ibsen had written a preface to that 
play (because, as our subject would say, he 
could) those dozen words are the whole num- 
ber of which it need have consisted. There 
was nothing to say, because everything had 
beeti^ said which the dramatist cared in the 
least about saying. But in Mrs. Warren^ s Pro- 
fession everything has not been said. There is 
no reason why the author should not take a 
couple of prefaces to lead up to it, and half a 
dozen treatises to lead down ; we know, and he 
knows, how well he can do them, and there is 
not the smallest supposition on either side 
that their interest is any less in kind or degree 
than the play which happens to come in the 
middle. Our pulse during that interregnum of 
reason will move neither faster nor slower than 
while reason was reigning before or when 
reason begins to reign after. But because the 

9S 



DRAMATICS 

author is aware that we shall expect j^ pulse 
to move faster, he has included some uusiness 
with a rifle, a concession to our morbid desire 
that " something interesting " shall be made to 
happen. The business with the rifle, it is to be 
observed, does not serve at all the same 
purpose as the effects we may find Ibsen 
preparing ; it does not point and underline the 
revelation of the consanguinity of FraAk and 
Vivie as Ibsen's elaborate leading up to the 
cork-drawing episode points and underlines 
the consanguinity of Oswald and Regina. It 
is just there for its own sake, in the belief that 
we like it, and if the author himself doesn't 
much like it, there is the readiest possible 
consolation for him in the reflection th'dt it is 
by the originality of its morality that a fiction 
enters the first order, with no objection offered 
if the rest is ready - made. In a sentence, 
our subject has got the consanguinity in ; 
surely he may be allowed to play the usual 
tricks with a rifle ! 

Now that is the kind of play Mrs. Warren's 
Profession is. It is the kind of play, I think, 
we should expect from the Puritan turned 
playwright. Its message is a grave message, 
but its author " has not been sparing of such 
lighter qualities as I could endow the book 
with for the sake of those who ask nothing 



BERNARD SHAW 

from 5 . 'ay but an agreeable pastime."^ It 
has all Tts author's intellectual integrity, but 
none of the aesthetic integrity of Ibsen. 
" Nothing would please our sanctimonious 
British public more than to throw the whole 
guilt of Mrs. Warren's profession on Mrs. 
Warren herself. Now the whole aim of my 
play," says the author, "is to throw that 
guilt o./the British public itself." But Ibsen 
never did modify thus his plays from within 
outwards ; the peculiar " tightness " of his 
conception of the dramatic form, with its 
advantages and its limitations, is the conse- 
quence of his craftsmanlike desire to relate 
the smallest external part to the centre. 
Thus >^ Ghosts his sole absorbing wish (so far 
as it is concerned with the throwing of guilt at 
all, which would be a strange way of putting it) 
is to throw the guilt on the late Mr. Alving. 
The Norwegian public may blame themselves 
for the cheerless environment which their 
social system awarded the late Mr. Alving if it 
pleases them. But essentially the procedure of 
Ibsen is a procedure from the particular to the 
general. " This is the history of the Alving 
family," says Ibsen in effect ; " I daresay you 
may not be wrong if you choose to find this 
sitting-room a microcosm." 

^ Foreword to Popular Edition of J\Jan and Sitperman (1911) 

100 



DRAMATICS 



IV 



But to our author, it is already apparent, the 
play is not the thing; it is in the message, and 
not in the play, that the social conscience is to 
be caught. The message is limed, as it were, 
with all those lighter qualities of which this 
author has no mean endowment. Ind. d those 
lighter qualities are present in such quantity 
that before Mrs. Warren's Profession they suf- 
ficed Mr. Shaw to write two of the most amus- 
ing comedies in the English language, and after 
Mrs. Warren's Profession, when the contem- 
porary fashion of trying to write plays in the 
Ibsen manner had passed over him, tl vy have 
served him to deck out his philosophy in 
theatrical form as well as to give him a number 
of opportunities for minor relaxation. 

Thus Mrs. Warren's Profession, which was 
written in 1894, will serve us as some kind of 
a touchstone. Apart from the circumstance 
that it has happened to crop up, it will serve 
us better than Widowers' Houses, a play of 
which the grave message — that, in regard to 
slum property, " the dirtier a place is the 
more rent you get, and the decenter it is, the 
more compensation you get " — is less clearly 
the raison d'etre. On one side of Mrs. Warren's 

101 



BERNARD SHAW 

Profession we may group the comedies written 
entirel\J ', it of those Hghter quahties of which 
our subject is master : the comedies of which 
Arms and the Man and You Never Can Tell 
are the type perfect. Then come the plays 
which conform more or less to the Mrs. Warren, 
or pseudo-Ibsen, period : plays in which the 
lighter qualities set off and render acceptable 
the gra^ . ^ message. These plays are various, 
and might be held to range from the Candida 
of 1894-5 to The Doctor's Dilemma of 1911. 
Finally, and indeed all the time, emerges the 
third group of plays, in which the lighter 
qualities, freed from the bondage to theatrical 
craftsmanship, gambol no more for their own 
delight,^ however, but in the service of the 
grave ihessage naked and unashamed. These 
are the plays of " discussion," beginning, I 
suppose, with Man and Suyerman, embracing 
John BulVs Other Island, Major Barbara, 
Getting Married, Misalliance, and ending — 
Mr. Shaw knows where. 

That, then, or something like that, is the 
progress presented by our subject's drama, 
to a view that does not claim to be anything 
more than approximate. If we wished to be 
subtle, we might regard Arms and the Man 
and You Never Can Tell as the Puritan's 
attempt to capture the theatre for his pur- 

102 



DRAMATICS 

poses by means of a preliminary demonstra- 
tion that those purposes were no ';|ferent 
from the theatre's own. Mr. Shaw i\.xs him- 
self told us how he deliberately compounded 
the second of them out of the well-used 
ingredients — an if-possible-comic waiter, a little 
eating and drinking and dancing. The theatre 
once his, we may see Mr. Shaw behaving to 
the public precisely as St. Thomas a^Becket 
behaved to the King ; the ear he haa^vvon by 
jests he proceeded to preach into. But Mr. 
Shaw did not drop all at once the pretence that 
it was the theatre he really was interested in, 
as the Archbishop dropped his interest in the 
world ; he not only wrote for a little longer 
pleasant comedies such as Captain Brass- 
bound's Conversion which conform to tlie first 
of our groups, but he continued up to the very 
end, as we have seen, to take the lighter 
qualities into partnership. — Thus Mr. Shaw's 
early division of his plays into " pleasant " and 
" unpleasant " is too simple : it is to be 
likened exactly to his discovery that in the 
change from the second group of plays to the 
third he had been actuated by a love of the pure 
Greek form. We shall be nearer the truth if 
we look upon the transition as from the 
Puritan's oratio ohliqua into the Puritan's 
or alio recta. All the time, according to our 

103 



BERNARD SHAW 

portrait — even at the time of those early little 
mast^ jf . .ces in which the utilitarian triumphed 
astonis^.mgly — Mr. Shaw did want more than 
anything else to use the theatre to talk in. 
First he captured it ; then he began to talk 
through the crevices of the ordinary stage 
framework ; finally he threw that framework 
out of the theatre, and gave the theatre over to 
open.d'^^bate between the manifold projections 
of his ( vn personality. 

To complete our sketch, it will be necessary 
to make provision here for one fourth or sub- 
sidiary group of plays — the plays for Puritans 
self -announced. This will not be in any sense 
an exact group, but, regarding Ccesar and 
Cleopatra (1898) as the archetype, we may 
include in it the plays in which Mr. Shaw has 
handled history. These are full of enlighten- 
ment as to the kind of drama our subject's is 
and is not ; but they do not indicate any 
emergence of his specific talents different from 
that we should have expected, and have 
already allowed for. 



In the first place, then, let us credit the plays 
of Mrr-Shaw with all the debating virtues. We 
have seen that his aptitude for quick, spirited 
speech was a natural one ; his early novels, 

104 



DRAMATICS 

which are quite without a genuine basis of 
imaginative existence, have only to run j^^ .^inst 
some topic to be raised to a state of intel actual 
excitement which precipitates itself in dialogue. 
We know in what manner this natural aptitude 
was trained and disciplined by the experience 
of the platform. It would be hard to say in 
what degree our pleasure in Mr. Shaw's theatre 
is contributed by its readiness in retort ^lone. 
A thousand instances will come crowdhig in 
upon even the least diligent of his playgoers : 
Major Swindon's " What do you expect me to 
think of that speech, Mr. Anderson ? " and 
Mr. Anderson's " I never expect a soldier to 
think, sir " ; Felix Drinkwater's " Orn maw 
grenfawther's tombstown, it is," and Captain 
Brassbound's " It will be on your own tomb- 
stone, presently, if you cannot hold your 
tongue " ; in Major Barbara the poor man's 
" I wouldn't have your conscience, not for all 
your income," followed inevitably by the rich 
man's, *' I wouldn't have your income, not for 
all your conscience, Mr. Shirley." This is the 
typical Shaw " laugh " ; it is for moments such 
as these that we must for ever be indebted to 
the comedy of our subject. Mere "mpulsive- 
ness and excess of speech have never : eased to 
delight him. 

Mr. Shaw has admitted that there are 
105 



BERNARD SHAW 

counsels which are vaUd '' for plays in which 
theii J- nothing to discuss." But, he adds : 
" Tff^.i may be disregarded by the play- 
wright who is a moralist and a debater as 
well as a dramatist. From him, within the 
inevitable limits set by the clock and by the 
physical endurance of the human frame, people 
will stand anything as soon as they are matured 
enough and cultivated enough to be susceptible 
to the appeal of his particular form of art." 
That people will stand anything which succeeds 
in giving them pleasure is perfectly true ; it is 
the firm basis of common sense in all that our 
subject has said, and the more that he has 
implied, regarding the negligibility of artistic 
technique. But the point is, not what the 
public will stand, but what the artist wishes 
to give them. Mr. Shaw wishes to give them 
morals and he employs quite naturally the 
means of the skilled and delightful debater. If 
he has been too long, the public have left before 
the end as remorselessly as the Fabians have 
left him a quarter of an hour before the 
inevitability of the Millennium was demon- 
strated ; but they have both enjoyed them- 
selves. That all this dramatic debating is on 
the surface of things, however, is proved by 
referring for one moment to any other dramatist 
you like who is in the enjoyment of a simi- 

106 



DRAMATICS 

larly European reputation. We will not say 
Ibsen, because Ibsen has come into this c, 'jter 
already, to render first aid at another c -i.ical 
juncture. Let us take a dramatist, for the 
better achievement of our parallel, who is 
something at least of a moralist and who has 
shown himself to be not the most negligible kind 
of debater, although he has chosen to be this 
in other works than his dramatic. Let us take 
M. Maeterhnck. 

It really does not matter in the least what 
play of M. Maeterlinck's we take, but we will 
say Monna Vanna. Now the whole distin- 
guishing character of the first act of Monna 
Vanna, the whole of our subject's " some- 
thing really interesting," consists not in what 
we see, nor in the amusing, or the witty, or 
the conspicuously poetic quality of the words 
that are spoken ; it consists simply in the 
progressive creation of illusion. That is what 
the dramatist wants to do ; and in order 
that the public may " stand " what he wants 
to do, he calls to his aid his own particular 
mastery over the theatre's own particular 
powers. The first act of Monna Vanna is for 
three-fourths of its length a dialogue between 
two persons : that is what the dramatist wants, 
and since a dialogue of this length between two 
persons is not an easy thing for the public to 

107 



BERNARD SHAW 

stand, and recruitment of their number by 
aeif -' ne or other means is outside his scheme 
of Wxmgs, he proves himself a dramatist by 
rendering this conversation interesting. Now 
there are two ways of rendering dramatic con- 
versation interesting (if the matter may be 
put so crudely) : one is to be judged by the 
number of things you stick on to it, the other 
by ti\e number of things you catch up in it. 
Wilde was a practitioner in the first kind, Ibsen 
in the second, Shakespeare in both, but when 
in the second kind, the more Shakespeare 
he. The dramatist may catch up the little 
trivialities of general life with an intensive 
purpose, as Shakespeare did in the conversa- 
tion of Shallow and Silence in the second part 
of King Henry the Fourth ; or he may catch up 
something of profound inner suggestiveness, as 
when Shakespeare threw into Hamlet's pro- 
phecy of long life for the married the sudden con- 
ditioning clause, " all but one.'' Wiat Maeter- 
linck is doing in this particular act is catching 
up into his dialogue all the things that are 
necessary to the imaginative miderstanding 
of his fable. He is positing his problem. 
He is '' preparing " (oh horrible words !) his 
" situation."' He is creating, in this particular 
play, for the events of which it happens that 
our belief is to be asked, the illusion of reality. 

108 



DRAMATICS 

In another play it might be another illusion, 
as Congreve and Vanbrugh beget the i Di])ion 
of amoralitj'^ before plunging us into the love- 
chase of IMillamant and Mirabell or Loveless 
and Berinthia. This particular business, this 
part of your task which consists in employing 
the theatre's subtlest means to achieve the 
theatre's plainest ends, does seem, whatever 
you may call it, to be part of the business 
of the dramatist. 

And now let us see in what manner, and to 
what extent, INIr. Shaw performs this part of 
the dramatist's business. Do not let us take 
the drama of discussion in its most extreme 
and self-announced manifestations ; do not 
let us take Getting Married or Misalliance, 
which are a " debate " and a " conversation " 
respectively — let us rather take The Doctor'' s 
Dilemma, which is a " tragedy." What is 
that highly diverting first act, as a matter of 
plain truth, all about ? It is about the medical 
profession. And what is it preparing us for ? 
Well, it is preparing us for more about the 
medical profession — for as much more about 
the medical profession as, within the inevit- 
able limits set by the clock, we shall be likely 
to stand. Is it, in any very profound sense, 
preparing us for the story of Louis Dubedat 
and Jennifer, as Maeterlinck was preparing us 

109 



BERNARD SHAW 

for t^e story of Prinzivalle and Vanna ? We 
real "' cannot say that it is. And when we 
comt'to the story of Dubedat, to the tragic 
story of the man of genius who was not also 
a man of honour, can it really be said that we 
have been persuaded into the most suitable 
possible mood for the reception of that story ? 
Again one does not think that that can be 
said. The confession of Mr. Shaw's failure is 
to be found asserted by himself. And the 
point is that it is not a failure in what we 
wanted him to do (supposing we were so 
foolish), but a failure in what he himself 
wanted to do. We cannot be too clear that 
to ask Mr. Shaw to impart his morality by 
means of the implicit method of Maeterlinck, 
and to condemn him because he has not done 
so, would be very bad criticism ; indeed it 
would be the negation of criticism, whose only 
business is to detect what a man has wanted 
to do and to judge him according to the 
success with which he has done it. Mr. Shaw 
has wanted us to believe that his Jennifer 
was " heartbroken," and we do not believe 
that she was heartbroken. Mr. Shaw has 
wanted us to understand that B. B.'s feeling, 
when he misquoted Shakespeare at the death- 
bed, " absurdly expressed as it is, is too sin- 
cere and humane to be ridiculed." And that 

110 



DRAMATICS 

is something that we do not understand , We 
have laughed, and that has been good ; Dti)t we 
have laughed, and that is all. And the coxiiplete- 
ness of Mr. Shaw's self-assertion of failure is 
rounded and perfect when he tells us that to 
laugh is the one thing he did not want us to do. 
Let us then here make the assertion and have 
done with it, that in all the sensitive and patient 
finesses that go to fit dramatic means to 
dramatic ends, that go, I suppose, to build up 
great drama, our subject is no kind of a 
dramatist at all. This, at the end of a first 
act that is all profession-baiting, that is all 
idea-mongering, that is Anti-Vivisection and 
Anti-Vaccination and Jane Marsh's arm, is 
the positing of the dramatic problem : — 

Sir Patrick. Well, Mr. Saviour of Lives, which is it to be ? 
that honest, decent man Blenkinsop, or 
that rotten blackguard of an artist, eh ? 

RiDGEON. It's not an easy case to judge, is it ? 
Blenkinsop's an honest decent man ; 
but is he any use ? Dubedat's a rotten 
blackguard ; but he's a genuine source 
of pretty and pleasant and good things. 

Sir Patrick. What will he be a source of for that poor 
innocent wife of his, when she finds him 
out? 

RiDGEON. That's true. Her life will be a hell. 

Sir Patrick. And tell me this. Suppose you had this 
choice put before you : either to go 

111 



d 



BERNARD SHAW 

through life and find all the pictures 
bad but all the men and women good, 
or to go through life and find all the 
pictures good and all the men and 
women rotten. Which would you 
choose ? 
RiDGEON. That's a devilishly difficult question, 

Paddy. The pictures are so agreeable 
and the good people so infernally dis- 
agreeable and mischievous, that I really 
can't undertake to say offhand which I 
' should prefer to do without. . . . 

It is posited with the highest kind of debating 
effectiveness, it has all the air of " something 
interesting," we have stood with delight what 
went before and (although we shall probably 
leave before the curtain falls) we shall stand 
with delight what follows afterwards. But 
that need not blind us to the fact that it is a 
pretty jejune kind of thing as drama. The 
play is not really about Dubedat : the play is 
really about the medical profession. The 
most tragic thing in the world may be (as 
Ridgeon says) a man of genius who is not 
also a man of honour; but the fact remains 
that The Doctors Dilemma is not the most 
tragic thing in the world. It is a peg to hang a 
treatise upon. And because the treatise will 
not all get on to the peg, you will find the rest 
of it in the preface. 

112 



DRAMATICS 

VI 

We thus arrive at the preface as the dis- 
tinguishing feature of Mr. Shaw's drama. It 
is the general which is never quite forgotten 
in the particular. It is the dramatic overplus 
which is not worked in. It is the excess of the 
philosophy over the anecdote. It is the 
Puritan fact on which the Utilitarian fiction is 
founded. 

Let us do our best to remember these fre- 
quently melodramatic prefaces — (" the excited 
reader," you will find yourself) — ^these always 
delightful prefaces, of our subject. Do we not 
remember the care and enthusiasm with which 
they give us the facts ? Once upon a time 
Mr. Shaw had to write articles in which to 
give us the facts, and to depend upon the 
journals to publish them. He wrote a paper 
entitled A Dramatic Realist to His Critics, 
which was a delightfully witty paper, and 
which was entirely devoted to adducmg the 
facts in evidence of his chocolate cream 
soldier. He quoted the Duke of Wellington 
and the modern strategists, and he completely 
proved to his own satisfaction that chocolate 
creams were just what a really efficient soldier 
would carry in his ammunition wallet. Not that 
H 113 



BERNARD SHAW 

that added to, or subtracted from, our delight 
in tha anti-romantic comedy ; but Mr. Shaw 
enjoyed tiie exercise. Now that state of affairs 
is changed, and if he has any knowledge to 
air he airs it in a preface. 

Mr. Shaw has reason to suspect that certain 
young women get married without being in- 
formed by their criminally timid or neglectful 
parents of what is expected of young women 
when they get married. Perhaps someone has 
told him so. At any rate, he hears somewhere 
of an isolated case which would seem to lend 
colour to his suspicion, and in it goes to a 
Preface on Parents and Children, with the 
remark that " apparently it does happen." 
A boy has been birched by a schoolmaster : 
" I had intended to give the particulars," writes 
our subject. On how many occasions has he 
carried the intention into tolerable practice ! 
It was not for our good that we should enjoy 
Thomas Broadbent before we had been given 
the particulars of Denshawai. The preface 
to Mrs. Warreri^s Profession is so complete 
and explicit a treatise that it renders any play 
on the subject quite unnecessary. The Doctor^ s 
Dilemma is but a pale shadow of the Preface 
on Doctors. The preface to Caesar and Cleo- 
patra^ in which the facts about Cassar appear, 
is a much more impressive production than 

114 



DRAMATICS 

Ccesar and Cleopatra, in which Caesar appears. 
Do we not remember the extreme and rxlmost 
unprincipled efforts of these prefaces to get 
us into a state of convinced receptivity, so 
that the theatre (which is a church) might 
preach to converted men ? Mr. Shaw would 
state in one place that the human impulses to 
murder, burglary, etc., were negligible (we 
found him doing so on page 34 of this study), 
being then bent upon shocking us into a proper 
penitence for our sins of commission. He 
would then frequently proceed, the business 
now being to flagellate our sins of omission, to 
the basing of a case on some instance of just 
such negligible isolation. " Nobody worth 
counting believes directly, frankly, and in- 
stinctively that when a person commits a 
murder and is put into prison for twenty years 
for it, the free and innocent husband or wife of 
that murderer should remain bound by the 
marriage." In short (as our subject would 
say), nobody worth counting commits any 
murders — our barbarian penal code may be 
scrapped ; but on the other hand so many 
people commit murders that the hardship 
imposed on free and innocent persons through 
the deprivation of conjugal rights is appalling 
— our monstrous divorce laws are a disgrace. 
It cannot be necessary to multiply instances 

115 



BERNARD SHAW 

of the/ truly characteristic manner in which 
our subject has had it both ways. There have 
been times at which even those who know no 
pleasure in life like being convinced must 
have agreed with Socrates ; that truly, Glau- 
con, the power of the art of controversy is a 
very extraordinary one. 

But we have not come so far in this study 
without getting "up" to Mr. Shaw. We are 
not going to enter an objection to the prefaces 
of our subject because they are calculated to 
throw dust in the eyes of the jury. It is no 
part of our purpose to throw any guilt at all. 
There are people who reprobate Mr. Shaw's 
prefaces on the ground that their author gave 
up to politics what was meant for mankind — 
that he put into prefaces, that is to say, the 
emotional and intellectual vigour he ought to 
have kept unimpaired for the plays. But the 
purpose of this chapter is a purely demonstra- 
tive purpose, and we will content ourselves 
therefore with pointing to the manner in 
which, as a matter of fact, the institution of 
the preface erects itself in the middle of our 
dramatist's record, and divides his works for 
the theatre into precisely the two classes we 
have already arrived at (p. 103). If the reader 
cares at this point to turn to the works of Mr. 
Shaw on his shelf, he will find that Arms and 

116 



DR^AMATICS 

the Man and You Never Can Tell, together 
with Candida, had eighteen pages of preface 
to their three hundred and twenty of play. 
If now he moves his hand along a yard or so 
and takes down Misalliance, he will find that 
the pages of preface are one hundred and 
nineteen and the pages of play ninety-nine. 
Mr. Shaw, that is to say, had first of all to 
get his work into the theatre, and wii^ih that 
end in view he shaped it as well as he could. 
Interpreting the characteristic task of the 
dramatist, on its technical side, as the in- 
vention of " anecdote," he gave the whole of 
his exceptional intelligence to the invention of 
really delightful anecdotes. But when Mr. 
Shaw had got his work into the theatre, he 
paid very little further attention to anecdote 
but went on delivering his philosophic goods in 
the thinnest and lightest of fictional disguises. 
That is the explanation of why Mr. Shaw has 
not advanced one single step upon Arms and 
the Man in any direction that has anything at 
all to do with the technical mastery of the 
theatre. That is the explanation of the great 
part which repetition plays in the theatre of our 
subject. Dry den said of Ben Jonson, " One 
cannot say that he wanted wit, but rather that 
he was frugal of it." Mr. Shaw has neither 
wanted wit nor been frugal of it. But if one 

117 



BERNARD SHAW 

cannot say that he has wanted invention, one 
may Ijertainly say — well, that he has been 
frugal of it. 

And it is precisely here that enlightenment 
comes as to the part Mr. Shaw has played as 
critic, and particularly as self -critic. All his life 
he has only had to see a thing in a particular 
way himself to be certain immediately of twelve 
good reasons why no man who was not a fool 
could possibly see it in any other way. It was 
so with the drama. He found himself with a 
natural aptitude for debate, an aptitude 
humorous, pointed and searching ; he found 
" no limit to his power of conjuring up imagin- 
ary people in imaginary places, and finding 
pretexts for theatrical scenes between them." 
For the imaginative groundwork of drama it 
is probable that he had no great natural 
aptitude. And so what the artist did with 
greatest ease, the critic came in and asserted 
to be the artist's only worthy activity. Mr. 
Shaw was a natural hand at discussion, and so 
he defined the drama as discussion. In his 
first drama of discussion, Candida, there is still 
some attempt at the creation of dramatic 
illusion. We really believe in its " imaginary 
people " as we believe most astonishingly in 
Raina and her chocolate cream soldier. But 
because we leave off just as ignorant as Candida 

118 



DRAMATICS 

and her husband of what the secret in the 
poet's heart precisely is, because, that is to say, 
there is some failure in the task of the drama- 
tist, Mr. Shaw calls Candida a mystery, and 
converts at one stroke a defect into a quality. 
If Mr. Shaw had written this play later on, he 
would not have left us to guess at the secret in 
the poet's heart; he would have told us flatly 
in a preface. Candida thus stands at the 
parting of our subject's dramatic ways. It 
marks the last of his attempts to make the 
play the complete and self-sufficient vehicle of 
the " ideas " — the anecdote of the philosophy. 
After this he may achieve the pure technical 
feat once more in The Shewing-up of Blanco 
Posnet, but it will have the appearance of an 
accident. The most characteristic and mature 
theatre of our subject had its beginning after 
Candida was written. In his next play Mr. 
Shaw came to praise Caesar ; but he wrote a 
preface which buried him. 



VII 

It has been contended that the measure of 
Mr. Shaw's ability as a writer of prefaces is 
the measure of his inability as a writer of 
plays. Sometimes Mr. Shaw's prefaces have 
certainly made it very hard for Mr. Shaw's 

119 



BERNARD SHAW 

plays to follow them. " Into the blackest 
depths of this violation of children's souls . . ." 
we read, and we read on and get Misalliance. 
Misalliance is all very well ; but the one is so 
very much more profound an affair than the 
other. On other occasions it is instructive to 
note the statements of the preface when we 
remember that they are the basis of the illus- 
trative comedy which is to follow. For ex- 
ample, in the preface to Getting Married we 
read : " There is nothing more wounding to 
our sense of human dignity than the husband 
hunting that begins in every family when the 
daughters become marriageable ; but it is 
inevitable under existing circumstances ; and 
the parents who refuse to engage in it are bad 
parents, though they may be superior in- 
dividuals."' And we read again : " Under the 
influence of the emotion thus manufactured 
[by the convention that the natural relation 
between husband and wife or parent and 
child is one of intense affection] the most 
detestable people are spoilt with entirely un- 
deserved deference, obedience, and even affec- 
tion whilst they live, and mourned when they 
die by those whose lives they wantonly or 
maliciously made miserable." We may read 
those grave statements, and be distantly 
aware that there is a comedy to follow. But 

120 



DRAMATICS 

the question is, What kind of a comedy ? 
What kind of a comedy of husband-hunting, 
what kind of a comedy of parents and children 
— (good subjects both, for the Comic Spirit) — 
can follow those statements ? 

Comedy's function, Mr. Shaw says, is the 
destruction of old-established morals. It is one 
definition of comedy's function ; it is Mr. 
Shaw's own gloss upon the function which 
M. Bergson has brilliantly expounded, having 
no difficulty so long as he holds fast by the 
comedies of Moliere, but, like a wise man, 
giving the comedies of Shakespeare a wide 
berth. Comedy, according to M. Bergson, is 
" a kind of social ragging " ; laughter is a social 
gesture, having for function the punishment 
of any " special lack of adaptability to society." 
Well, it is possible to regard our laughter at 
Sganarelle, who argues that there is something 
wonderful in man which does what it wills with 
his body and who falls down in turning, as a 
punishment of the poor man for his special 
lack of adaptability to the stone he stubs his 
toe against. Don Juan's " Good, so your 
argument has broken your nose," is a concise 
social gesture on the part of the Comic Spirit. 
But transplant M. Bergson's theory of the 
comic from the other side of the Channel, where 
it may perhaps explain our laughter at Sgan- 

121 



BERNARD S H A W 

arc^llo, ov at Ari\olplu\ or at Orgon under the 
tabic, and it has but little help to give \is in the 
case of <nu- laughter at Square and Adams, and 
none at all when we laugh with Falstaff. 
Greater help it has to give perhaps in the case 
of Raina and Sergius, of Octavius and Ann, of 
Hroadbcnt and liatVigan, of Rinnniy and 
Snobby, of IMrs. ^Vhitetield and T.ady Kritomart 
and l\0(4nick Kanisden and Sir Ralph Rlooni- 
tield Hounington. And that is why >vc need 
not seriously quarrel with another French 
critic for his discovery in our subject of the 
English Moliere. Arms ami the Man is as 
economical and decisive a social gesture as Le 
Tartuffe, and *' the monstrous conceit which 
it is the business of romance to flatter " is 
pricked mid subsides at one and the same 
moment in which the heroine sinks to the 
ottoman. '* C e ^lonsiem* Loyal porte un air 
bien deloyal ! " says Moliere ; and ]Mr. Shaw's 
pleasure, from the time he wrote novels and 
called his lady pianist S/.e/y lupliea, to the 
time he wrote plays and called his lady acrobat 
Szczepanowska. has been imfailing in the 
luimorous opportunities of a name. 

AVe may give the French critic his English 
Moliere. But ^Ir. Shaw, in his work of de- 
stroying our old-established morals, has not 
always been so economical and decisive as we 

1-22 



DRAMATICS 

found liim in Arms and the Man. Tii our 
subject there is a ^reat deal of tlie privile^t'd 
talker, to wliom tlie more we listen the less care 
he takes in vviiat lie snys. Really when we ^et 
to Great Catherine we are inclined to fancy that 
the only Knj];lishnian who slill s<'es Ihe joke of 
the Enjrlishnian abroad is Mr. Shaw himself. 
There are mechanics il' you likt; in the laughter- 
niakinjr of Moliere : you may derives as an 
induction IVoin Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme 
that a man should not be too jimbilious, from 
I.e Misanthro|)(^ thai, he should not be too 
dilUcult to please, from L'Keole des l<\'mm(!S 
that he should not be too mechanical, IVoin 
L'Amour Medeein or Le M(jdecin Malgrcf* Lui 
that he should not trust the do(;tors too com- 
pletely. You may lind in such a typically 
English humorist as Fielding a chapter en- 
titled, *' In which the gentleman descants on 
bravery and heroic virtue, till an unlucky 
accident puts an end to the discourse," and 
fancy you have come upon the |)roof-perrect 
of the Rergsonian theory. Rut there is a 
difference to be observed in the comedy of our 
subject. 

It could baldly hap|)en but that Mr. SJiaw's 
primary intimacjy with the general and his 
only secondary interest in the particular 
should leave their mark upon his comic crea- 

12:5 



BERNARD SHAW 

tions. They have boon called into being by a 
hypothesis. In an earlier page of this study 
we found Mr. Shaw proceeding from the 
statement that " there are millions of poor 
people, dirty people, abject people " to the 
shelter in which ^lajor Barbara ministered at 
West Ham. That is exactly what one means 
by a procedure from the general to the particu- 
lar. The postulation of a person by intellectual 
necessity, as it were, and then the subsequent 
diligent humanization of that person, is a 
good way of artistic creation : it is Mr. Shaw's 
way. His people bear the burden of proof upon 
them. They carry the heavy responsibility 
that there are, a priori, a million just like them 
in the w^orld. That is what one means by the 
" type." ^Ir. Shaw's people are a perpetual 
reference back. They bear the endorsement 
'' refer to drawer." They live less for their 
own sakes than for the sake of the argument. 
But you would not expect to meet a million 
Falstaffs in the world. That is to say that 
there is another way of artistic creation, which 
is not JNIr. Shaw'S way. 

'* But suppose Shakespeare," says our sub- 
ject, '' had begun where he left off ! Suppose 
he had been born at a time when, as the result 
of a long propaganda of health and temperance, 
sack had come to be called alcohol, alcohol had 

ll>4 



DRAMATICS 

come to be called poison, corpulence had come 
to be regarded as either a disease or a breach 
of good manners, and a conviction had spread 
throughout society that the practice of con- 
suming ' a halfpenny worth of bread to an 
intolerable deal of sack ' was the cause of so 
much misery, crime, and racial degeneration 
that whole States prohibited the sale of potable 
spirits altogether, and even moderate drinking 
was more and more regarded as a regrettable 
weakness ! Suppose (to drive the change well 
home) the women in the great tficatrical 
centres had completely lost that amused 
indulgence for the drunken man which still 
exists in some out-of-the-way places, and felt 
nothing but disgust and anger at the conduct 
and habits of Falstalf and Sir Toby Belch ! 
Instead of Henry IV and The Merry Wives of 
Windsor, we should have something like Zola's 
L'Assommoir." There we are, back at the 
Statesman and at the Puritan again. We may 
think that, from Shakespeare, we should not 
have had anything in the least like Zola's 
L'Assommoir. We may think that the change 
is exaggerated ; or rather that it is the differ- 
ence between Mr. Shaw and Shakespeare, not be- 
tweenMr. Shaw's world andShakespeare'sworld. 
It is the difference, I suppose, between 
laughter for its own sake and laughter with a 

125 



BERNARD SHAW 

purpose ; between that divine, unconscious 
laughter which plays about Falstaff in the 
tavern, and that laughter which renders some- 
how curiously mean and depressing the drunken 
scene in Candida. It is the difference between 
the laughter which draws the chariot and 
the laughter which comes in at the cart's 
tail. Somehow even the happiest of the comic 
creations of our subject do seem, in the memory, 
to occupy that penitentiary position. Mr. Shaw 
spoke the final truth about himself when 
he said that he had adopted waggery as a 
medium. His is a grave message : it would 
issue gravely if it were not for the instinct of 
absurdity which has never deserted him. 

We might have paused earlier in this chapter 
during our consideration of the most sternly 
didactic of Mr. Shaw's novels, and refreshed 
ourselves with the absurdity of the following : 

" Why on earth do you call yourself Smilash ? " 
" I confess that the name has been a failure. I 
took great pains, in constructing it, to secure a plea- 
sant impression. It is not a mere invention, but a 
compound of the words smile and eyelash. A smile 
suggests good humour ; eyelashes soften the expres- 
sion and are the only features that never blemish a 
face. Hence Smilash is a sound that should cheer 
and propitiate. Yet it exasperates. It is really very 
odd that it should have that effect. ..." 

126 



DRAMATICS 

One does not know why one likes that so 
much ; but like it one does. It is what Mr. 
Shaw has called " the great artist's delight in 
playing with his ideas, his materials, and his 
readers " : it is part of " the enormous fund 
of joyousness which is the secret of genius." 
Mr. Shaw's delight in playing with his ideas 
has led us into some strange places. But that 
is not the point. Never has he penned the 
gravest part of his message without being 
promptly rather ashamed of himself and 
turning it to fun. That is very fortunate for us. 
The demand that we should not laugh at his 
fun, on the ground that that also is " either a 
disease or a breach of good manners," need not 
be taken very seriously, because it is merely 
more of his fun, and not the grave demand of 
the grave man that we should attend gravely 
to his grave message. When B. B. quotes 
Shakespeare, as a fitting thing to do with Death 
in the room, it is a shocking thing that he 
himself in his best professional manner should 
have committed the murder ; but is an absurd 
thing that he should mix Shakespeare so 
delightfully. Mr. Shaw knows that as well as 
we do ; he knows that the mere mechanical 
concatenation of the phrases is an automatic 
producer of laughter, although none of us 
perhaps, not M. Bergson nor Herr Freud even, 

127 



BERNARD SHAW 

knows why. But he remembers the gravity of 
his message, the thought of having a preface 
to Hve up to comes over him, and he asks us not 
to laugh. He would prefer us in the melting 
mood. " When a comedy is performed, it is 
nothing to me that the spectators laugh : any 
fool can make an audience laugh. I want to 
see how many of them, laughing or grave, are 
in the melting mood." Well, perhaps our 
subject's tragedy is in that, for the melting 
mood is one which has evaded him always. 
But the instinct of absurdity has never 
deserted him. That, in the service of the 
Puritan's grave message, has given us a drama 
for which we may be completely thankful. 
Mr. Shaw's instinct of absurdity is something 
as completely his own as Shakespeare's or 
Fielding's great unifying faculty of laughter. 
Do not let us look at it ungraciously, or pre- 
tend that it has not delighted us. There is, 
however, one possible sense in which we may 
take Mr. Shaw's demand that we should not 
laugh as something more than his fun. Deep 
down in our consciousness, and perhaps in his, 
lies the knowledge that he has wanted us to do 
something more than laugh — and we have 
not done it. We think we know what he 
means by the melting mood, and we think 
we know that, please us as he has, divert 

128 



DRAMATICS 

us as he has, instruct us as he has, he 
has not brought us to it. What he has really 
aimed at is a change of heart, only that 
is a consummation which to his particular 
temperament has presented itself as a change 
of ideas. He has adopted waggery as his 
medium, and while we have taken the waggery 
we have left the ideas. In the work of our 
subject there is that possibility of a selective 
rejection, as there is not in the work of the 
English comic masters. There is a passage in 
Fielding which will illustrate the unity of the 
true comic spirit as well as another ; it is the 
passage in Joseph Andrews in which Parson 
Adams and Mr. Pounce, in the chariot, discuss 
the virtue of charity ; 

" Sir," said Adams, " my definition of charity is, 
a generous disposition to relieve the distressed." — 
" There is something in that definition," answered 
Peter, " which I like well enough ; it is, as you say, 
a disposition, and does not so much consist in the 
act as in the disposition to do it. But, alas ! Mr. 
Adams, who are meant by the distressed ? Believe 
me, the distresses of mankind are mostly imaginary, 
and it would be rather folly than goodness to relieve 
them." — " Sure, sir," replied Adams, " hunger and 
thirst, cold and nakedness, and other distresses which 
attend the poor can never be said to be imaginary 
evils." — " How can any man complain of hunger," 
said Peter, " in a country where such excellent salads 

I 129 



BERNARD SHAW 

are to be gathered in almost every field ? or of thirst, 
when every river and stream produce such delicious 
potations ? And as for cold and nakedness, they are 
evils introduced by luxury and custom. A man 
naturally wants clothes no more than a horse or any 
other animal ; and there are whole nations who go 
without them ; but these are things perhaps which 

you, who do not know the world " " You \'*Till 

pardon me, sir," returned Adams ; "I have read of 
the Gymnosophists." — " A plague of your Jehosa- 
phats ! " cried Peter ; " the greatest fault in our 
constitution is the provision made for the poor, 
except that perhaps made for some others. Sir, I 
have not an estate which doth not contribute almost 
as much again to the poor as to the land-tax ; and I 
do assure you I expect to come myself to the parish 
in the end." 

Mr. Pounce is our subject's hopelessly private 
person. Is not his word precisely that of 
Mr. Shaw's Sartorius : " No gentlemen : when 
people are very poor, you cannot help them, 
no matter how much you may sympathize 
with them." Parson Adams is — well, one 
does not think our subject has drawn a Parson 
Adams. He has not drawn a figure at whom 
we laugh, and from whom we learn as we laugh. 
Mr. Shaw's Parson Adams is Father Keegan ; 
a Parson Adams for Puritans. There is no 
Keegan-Broadbent, to whom we listen and 
with whom we laugh. In order that we may 

130 



DRAMATICS 

learn from Father Keegan, Mr. Shaw has to 
ask us not to laugh at Tom Broadbent. That 
is the Puritan's tragedy. That is how those 
" lighter qualities " take their revenge. 



VIII 

There are, says the old Doctor in Mr. 
Chesterton's play, the things that are beauti- 
ful and the things that are there. Well, 
the plays of our subject are there ; and 
it has not seemed necessary in the course 
of this chapter to pause upon each one in 
order to recall its anecdote, its philosophy, 
and its characters. The philosophy, as a 
matter of fact, will have a chapter to itself in 
a moment, but the anecdotes and the charac- 
ters are well able to take care of themselves. 
If this chapter has advanced certain general 
propositions with regard to them, if, in the 
aggregate, it has viewed the drama of our 
subject from the angle at which the earlier 
chapters seemed to have placed us, that is all 
that can possibly be claimed for it ; it is left 
for the reader to apply those general proposi- 
tions to the memories with which his mind is 
peopled, and to form his own opinion as to 
where, if anywhere, they have their application. 

The point has come, however, at which it 
131 



BERNARD SHAW 

would be well to see the ultimate outcome in 
practice of the principles which, according to 
our portrait, have actuated Mr. Shaw as 
dramatist. We have seen already what hap- 
pened to The Doctor's Dilemma, in which 
play Mr. Shaw faced death and found that 
life did not cease to be funny. Since we did 
not believe ourselves to be in the face of 
death, and since that was what Mr. Shaw 
wished, as one at least among his several 
dramatic purposes, that we should believe, 
it Avas impossible not to conclude that there 
was some failure from full mastery in the 
achievement of those purposes. It was Mr. 
Shaw, and not life — we were forced to con- 
clude — that had not ceased to be funny. 
That was the other side, in regard to Mr. 
Shaw's " tragedy," to the adoption of waggery 
as a medium. In Mrs. Warren's Profession 
we saw that the " lighter qualities " were 
not so much present as indispensable traits in 
the picture as in the form of additional touches, 
— high lights lent to a gloomy genre piece in 
the purely utilitarian intention of rendering 
its message more widely acceptable. We 
found that discovery to be destructive of INIr. 
Shaw's integrity as an artist, but were careful 
to say no word against the integrity of his 
opinions. As to how Mr. Shaw's mixed 

132 



DRAMATICS 

practices work out in regard to the looser and 
more free form of composition of which John 
Bull's Other Island may be taken as type, we 
have seen very httle ; but that is because 
they obviously would work out in a simpler 
equation. What we have seen is that, even 
in the form at which Mr. Shaw has arrived 
by a process of cancelling out the difficulties, 
there is a degree of inassimilability in his 
comedy which places it lower than the highest. 
Like Man and Superman, it is a mixed delivery 
of goods — " a comedy and a philosophy." 
The way-bill is made out for two articles, and 
it is for such that we render acceptance. 

And in the end we come to Androcles and 
the Lion. Mr. Shaw has his ups and downs, 
with the least of us ; but the fatal fact is that 
Androcles and the Lion is the logical outcome 
of Mr. Shaw's aesthetic principles. What 
those principles amount to is that Mr. Shaw 
wants the drama to be serious, but his 
way of getting us to accept a serious drama 
is by means of being funny. Or put the 
case, if you like, the other way : Mr. Shaw 
wants the drama to be funny, but his con- 
science will only allow him to be funny 
in the course of being serious. Rather than 
in either one of those statements, it is pos- 
sible that somewhere between those two 

133 



BERNARD SHAW 

statements the real trouble lies. But in either 
case, or in both, the fact is that Mr. Shaw 
has distrusted his medium. Here, in this 
play, in what we may perhaps regard as the 
final issue of his most deeply held opinions, 
he has employed laughter, but he has not 
trusted laughter ; he has wished to be serious, 
but he has not had the courage of his serious- 
ness. The wonders of reality are the subject- 
matter — the wonders of reality, " when it 
comes close." Here is our subject's call to us 
to look life in the face, to seize each thing in 
its reality, by the free exercise of our living 
wills to secure the highest ends of the creative 
purpose. Lavinia has that happiness within 
herself, — but Lavinia is less than the lion. 
Mr. Shaw has looked at the central mysteries 
of the Christian faith at a crisis in their history, 
and he has seen the comicalities of the arena. 
He has employed the one to expound the 
other. The result is that failure in aesthetic 
unity which this chapter has been all about. 
For the intended reality does not " come 
close." The ultimate issue of Mr. Shaw's 
theatre is a pantomime lion. Mr. Shaw 
would like to have melted us, and the Life 
Force has seen to it that he shall only make 
us laugh. 



134 



DRAMATICS 



IX 

For the only dramatic secrets of which Mr. 
Shaw has the command are the secrets of 
speech, and there is more power to bring 
us to the melting mood in Desdemona's " I 
cannot speak of this " than in all Portia's 
skilled pleading. Our subject's notion of the 
manner in which to improve upon her is to 
make her the equal in discussion of lago, and 
the superior of the " simple Moorish soldier." 
Well, that would be another play and a 
different. For one kind of eloquence the 
skilled debater is not the man to go to, and 
that is the eloquence of silence. " It is not 
words that matter," another English dramatist 
has said. That, to our subject, would be the 
supreme heresy ; a kind of blasphemy against 
the Holy Ghost. 

In a sense, really in the final sense, all 
Mr. Shaw's people are talkers. We may 
divide them into three classes. There is a 
small class which consists of the people who 
talk with difficulty, of which ChoUy is the 
representative with his " certain amount of 
tosh," and they are sublimely ridiculous. 
There is a very much larger class who are the 
apt and ready mouthpieces of their kind or 

135 



BERNARD SHAW 

their class. Mr. Shaw runs gaily and lightly 
up and down the social scale, and his skill with 
Felix Drinkwater, with Enry Straker, with 
Peter Shirley, with Bohun and Bonnington and 
Boxer, with Napoleon and Caesar and Lady 
Britomart and General Burgoyne, with Rams- 
den and Tarleton and MaComas and Cokane 
and Gilbey and Knox, with William and Marzo 
and the Newspaper Man, with Darling Dora 
and Eliza Doolittle and Rummy and Snobby, 
never deserts him. They are sufficiently 
personalized, and have in addition a grant in 
aid from their creator's own readiness of 
repartee and deadliness of retort. But there is 
a third class of talkers who have this ultimate 
importance, that in them we may hear, without 
distortion and without dilution, their master's 
voice. These are the talkers by vocation, the 
apostles of the gospel, the priests of the cult. 
These are the figures who still hold the stage, 
when all the other puppets hang limp and 
depleted, with their virtue gone out of them. 
These are the real pillars of the theatre of dis- 
cussion — these gigantic male caryatides, these 
huge spouting figures, which support the only 
true church and most characteristic temple of 
our subject's dramatic achievement. There is 
a pathos but no shame in Undershaft's " My 
dear : I have no other way of conveying my 

136 



DRAMATICS 

ideas." But what place for pathos is there, 
what place for shame, in the colossal conception 
of John Tanner ? — who will vindicate the dig- 
nity and honour of his manhood, who will 
continue to speak out the happiness that is 
within himself, who will hold to the last plank 
of his platform, though the seas rise and the 
heavens fall ; who will "go on talking " in 
the face of a universe which rocks with laughter. 



137 



THE SECRET IN 
THE POET'S HEART 



" /t would be quite easy to make England a 
paradise, according to our present ideas, in a 
few years. There is no mystery about it ; the 
ivay has been pointed out over and over again. 
The difficulty is not the way but the will. And 
we have no will because the first thing done 
with us in childhood was to break our will " 
(Preface, Misalliance). 

So there we are : — " unsound citizens of an 
unsound nation, without sense enough to be 
ashamed or unhappy about it " (Preface, The 
Doctofs Dilemma). Mr. Shaw's own stream is 
nearing the sea, he says ; and that is the mud- 
bank he leaves us stranded upon. We could 
if we would — but we won't. And we won't, 
because we can't; because of those wicked 
parents and schoolmasters of ours, who have 
broken our will. It is a vicious circle. 

But perhaps it is not quite so vicious. Mr. Shaw 
is so excessive. Perhaps as the lively stream of 

138 



THE POET'S HEART 

his works is near its debouchment, he really is 
not quite so unhappy about us. The way has 
been pointed out over and over again : it is 
Mr. Shaw who has pointed it. Over and over 
again, in the course of the few pages of this 
inadequate study, have we not paused to 
admire him pointing it ? But we have not 
been unconscious, I suppose, that the direction 
he has been pointing is the direction he has 
been wanting to go. " According to our 
present ideas " means according to the ideas 
of our subject at the moment of writing — 
just that and nothing more. He wants us to 
have the will to realize his will, if we may put 
it that way. And for the rest of us there is 
the lethal chamber. That is not very good 
philosophy, but from the political humorist 
it comes well enough. Mr. Shaw's Paradise 
may perfectly well not be everybody's paradise, 
just as Blake's Heaven was the Calvinist's 
Hell, and just as Broadbent's Heaven was 
not Keegan's Heaven, for the matter of 
that. But Keegan's Hell was this present 
earth, if we remember correctly, and there 
are others of us who do not think so badly 
of this present earth. Of one thing we may 
be very certain, and that is that if Mr. Shaw's 
Paradise is not our paradise, the will to 
our paradise will not be the will to Mr. Shaw's 

139 



BERNARD SHAW 

paradise. Our virtues may thus very well be 
Mr. Shaw's vices ; indeed, the lack of will to 
Mr. Shaw's paradise, which appeared in the 
paragraph at the opening of this chapter, must 
itself be a vice. 

Poor old Falstaff will be the first to go. Mr. 
Shaw is going to put up with men's vices, as he 
is going to put up with their illnesses, *' until 
they give more trouble than they are worth, 
at which point we should, with many apologies 
and expressions of sympathy, and some gener- 
osity in complying with their last wishes, place 
them in the lethal chamber and get rid of them." 
He has explained all this in that preface to 
Major Barbara which was alluded to in an 
earlier chapter. If you ask who the " we " is, 
there is only one answer, and that is Mr. Shaw ; 
but really Mr. Shaw is under no kind of neces- 
sity of answering such questions — that is one of 
the pleasures of being irresponsible. (And the 
publicist is irresponsible by definition.) Fal- 
staff would go, because of what (as we saw) the 
ladies of the new theatrical centres think of 
his manners and customs. St. Francis would 
go, because the vice of poverty is a criminal 
vice. The late Mr. Herbert Spencer would go, 
because his opinions upon Man and the 
Socialist State would give more trouble than 
they were worth. " The majority of men at 

140 



THE POET'S HEART 

present in Europe," says Mr. Shaw in The 
Perfect IVagnerite, " have no business to be 
alive." That is a terrible picture, but, as the 
hymn says. 

Alleluia cannot always 

Be our song while here below. 

Our subject has preached so long from the 
text that happiness is within ourselves that we 
must not lose sight of the consequences of its 
realization. In the place of happiness, in the 
hedonists' sense, he has put will ; and in the 
place of reason, in the Hegelian sense, he has 
put will. That is why our parents and school- 
masters are guilty of such heinousness when 
they break it. But in both cases the will is, in 
the ultimate analysis, his own. Of course it 
could not be otherwise. Every artist, as well 
as every philosopher, re-makes Heaven and 
Earth in his own image. That is what our 
subject has done, in both capacities. He has 
drawn a full-length picture of the will to our 
happiness which is within himself, and he has 
called it the Life Force. 

With the subject of this study it is impossible 
to argue. One just has baldly to assert. I 
trust that nothing in the nature of argument 
will creep into this final chapter, or has crept 
already into those which have preceded it. 

141 



BERNARD SHAW 



II 

One thing is evident, and that is that it will 
not have to be a very long chapter. For our 
subject's philosophy, now that we have come 
to it, is not very formidable. It is a philosophy 
by courtesy, as it were. It consists of what has 
been in the air ; he does not himself make any 
very serious claim to have originated it. What 
he has done is to make its expression quite 
triumphantly his own — and that he has done 
by means of the anecdotes. If we have called it 
a philosophy, it is for convenience, because 
that is what Mr. Shaw has called it. Remember- 
ing that Cokane was moral without being a 
moralist, let us employ the distinction in 
defining our subject as philosophical without 
being a philosopher. And then, in the interests 
of exact statement, and remembering our 
Republic, let us make one further refinement, 
and call him philodoxical rather than philo- 
sophical. For what was Plato's distinction 
between the two kinds of people ? We may 
as well have the whole passage : — 

But what, on the other hand, must we say of those 
who contemplate things as they are in themselves, and 
as they exist ever permanent and immutable ? Shall 
we not speak of them as knowing, not opining ? 

142 



THE POET'S HEART 

That also is a necessary inference. 

Then shall we not assert that such persons admire 
and love the objects of knowledge — the others, the 
objects of opinion ? . . . Shall we commit any fault 
if we call these people philodoxical rather than 
philosophical, that is to say, lovers of opinion rather 
than lovers of wisdom ? And will they be very much 
offended with us for telling them so ? 

No, not if they will take my advice : for it is wrong 
to be offended with the truth. 

Those therefore that set their affections on that 
which in each case really exists, we must call not 
philodoxical, but philosophical ? 

Yes, by all means. 

Now has our subject set his affections " on 
that which in each case really exists " ? I do 
not think we can say so. Do we come thus near 
to the end of a study of Mr. Shaw's works 
with the conviction growing and swelling 
within us that Mr. Shaw is one of those " who 
contemplate things as they are in themselves, 
and as they exist ever permanent and im- 
mutable " ? No, by no means. But what Mr. 
Shaw really has loved is the objects of opinion. 
It is extremely hard to say what he would have 
done without them. As an economist he has 
opined that we should all be extremely happy 
with a statutory income of £365 a year. As a 

143 



BERNARD SHAW 

critic he has opined that art is great in the 
degree in which " ideas " enter into its subject- 
matter. As a sociologist he has opined that the 
family is the worst enemy of the State. As a 
psychologist he has opined that " there are 
many women of admirable characters, strong, 
capable, independent, who dislike the domestic 
habits of men ; have no natural turn for 
mothering and coddling them ; and find the 
concession of conjugal rights to any person 
under any conditions intolerable by their self- 
respect " — and things of that kind. And as a 
dramatist he has dispensed with characteriza- 
tion and put in its place the allocation of 
opinions. 

Philodoxical, then, and not philosophical. 
And that is a very excellent thing to be, when 
so many philosophers are dull fellows whom no 
one reads, unless he is another philosopher. 
Mr. Shaw's philodoxy we have not only read ; 
we have listened to it in the theatre. Out of the 
mouths of Mrs. Knox and Peter Keegan has 
come wisdom. Major Barbara has successfully 
imparted to us her teleological conception. 
Blanco Posnet has been converted into a 
convinced kind of dualist, not untouched by 
mysticism, before our eyes. The manufacturer 
of explosives has taught us by analogy with his 
worn-out engines what we ought to do with 

144 



THE POET'S HEART 

our worn-out religions and moralities. Napo- 
leon himself has been impressed to the service 
of teaching us that " happiness, little woman, 
is the most tedious thing in the world " — unless 
it is that happiness which comes to each man 
who does " the will of Heaven that is in 
himself." That is the lesson the Irish priest 
read to the English candidate for Parlia- 
ment. That is the power by which Major 
Barbara surmounted her " hour of trial," that 
is the power by which Mrs. Knox surmounted 
hers, that is the power by which the Devil's 
Disciple surmounted his. Mr. Shaw's drama 
is rich in hours of trial ; they are the Puritan's 
peripety. "What I did last night," says Dick, 
" I did in cold blood, caring not half so much 
for your husband, or for you, as I do for 
myself. I had no motive and no interest : all 
I can tell you is that when it came to the point 
whether I would take my neck out of the 
noose and put another man's into it, I could 
not do it. I don't know why not : I see myself 
as a fool for my pains ; but I could not and I 
cannot." God had "a cinch on" Richard, in 
the phrase of Blanco ; the Life Force just 
picked him up by the scruff of his little neck, 
in the way Valentine and Gloria, and Tanner 
and Ann, were treated. And what does it all 
amount to ? Well, I suppose it all amounts to 
K 145 



BERNARD SHAW 

Major Barbara's '' let God's work be done for 
its own sake : the work lie had to create us to 
do because it cannot be done except by Hving 
men and women." I suppose it all amounts to 
what Blanco got on to the table to tell to the 
boys : 

. . . Yah I What about the croup ? It was early 
days when He made the croup, I guess. It was the 
best He could think of then ; but when it turned out 
wrong on His hands He made you and me to fight the 
croup for Him. You bet He didn't make us for 
nothing ; and He wouldn't have made us at all if He 
could have done His work without us. By gum, that 
must be what we're here for ! He'd never have made 
us to be rotten drunken blackguards like me, and good- 
for-nothing rips hkc Feemy. He made me because He 
had a job for me. He let me run loose till the job was 
ready ; and then I had to come along and do it, 
hanging or no hanging. And I tell you it didn't feel 
rotten : it felt bully, just bully. . . . 

I suppose it all amounts to the secret in the 
poet's heart. 

" There are larger loves and diviner dreams 
than the fireside ones," says Major Barbara. 
Those were what Mr. Shaw's poet was in 
danger of — the fireside loves and the fireside 
dreams. He flew into the night, if one re- 
members correctly. That is why he is the true 

146 



THE POET'S HEART 

hero of our subject's drama. And Barbara is 
the true heroine. If Candida, who was con- 
tented with the fireside loves and the fireside 
dreams, is Mr. Shaw's Everywoman, Barbara is 
his woman in a thousand. Barbara ended her 
hour of trial by going in for " reality." Mr. 
Shaw is all for going in for reality. When 
Margaret Knox went in for reality she knocked 
two teeth out of a policeman. When Ferrovius 
went in for reality he killed seven of the 
Emperor's picked gladiators. And they both 
felt just as bully as Blanco about it. 



Ill 

If Mr. Shaw had happened to want an old 
name for his principal comedy instead of a 
new one, he might have called it after Dekker's 
If this be not a Good Play, the Devil is in It. 
For the third act of Man and Superman, in 
which the Devil appears and hangs the action 
up considerably, is above all else that our 
subject has written the primer of the poet's 
heart. Mr. Shaw's Hell is the place where one 
merely amuses one's self : Mr. Shaw's Heaven 
is " the home of the masters of reality." If 
one wished to appreciate the whole of the 
difference between the humane destructive 
talent of M. Anatole France, and the humane 

147 



BERNARD SHAW 

destructive talent of our subject (to be sure, a 
national difference) one might read the third 
act of Man and Superman immediately after 
reading the last chapter of La Re volte des Anges. 
M. France depicts Hell and he depicts Heaven, 
and the suggestion of his picture rather is that 
he would not give a snap of the fingers for the 
difference between them. But Mr. Shaw gives 
Hell, in the strictest scriptural sense, to the 
hopelessly private persons. His Heaven is re- 
served for those who live and work instead of 
playing and pretending. He discriminates by 
means of his wit, but he discriminates accord- 
ing to his Puritan prepossessions. 

The truth is there never was a more ro- 
mantic admirer of reality than our subject. 
His religion is a romantic anthropomorph- 
ism : what more romantic theological con- 
cept could there possibly be than that of 
" a young God with his future before him " ? 
His philosophy is a romantic protest against 
the evolutionary monism of Darwin and 
Haeckel. He is all for Lamarck's giraffe, 
provided it is agreed that it grew its neck 
out of the happiness within itself, and because 
the Life Force had a job for its long neck to 
do. His economics are a romantic protest 
against the materialism of Marx, and a per- 
petual exhibition of the glorious excitement 

148 



THE POET'S HEART 

of a life among " hard facts." His aesthetics are 
a romantic onslaught upon the morals of 
yesterday, in the romantic name of to-morrow. 
His novels are romances : in three of them 
there is a man with his back against the wall — 
(what figure is there more romantic than the 
one against forty-eight millions ?) — and the 
fourth has a professional pugilist for hero. His 
drama is one long exhibition of the part played 
by romance in the world of ideas. Love, in his 
drama, is the electrical experience of a Valen- 
tine in face of his Gloria. Marriage, in his 
drama, is not for the homely purposes ordained 
by the Prayer Book, but for the procreation 
of the Superman. " And sweet religion makes 
a rhapsody of words " — it is a tremendous 
affair, which Blanco discovers with the aid of 
a rainbow and Major Barbara with the aid 
of explosives. 

Finally, has not our subject's whole conduct 
of this earthly adventure been romantic ? 
Romance is the artificial inducement of glam- 
our. In this sense of the word, it was the 
enemy. Our subject proposed to destroy 
romance. It was the great heresy to be swept 
away from art and life. No more glamour, he 
said, no more glamour — and proceeded to 
induce an aura of glamour around his own 
person. " It would be far better for everyone, 

149 



BERNARD SHAW 

as well as far honostor, if young people were 
taiiijht that what they call love is an appetite 
wlneh, like all other appetites, is destroyed 
for the moment by its gratitieation ; that no 
profession, promise, or proposal made under 
its influence should bind anybody. ..." There 
was to be no more glanunn* about love and 
marriage ; but there might be glamour about 
Mr. Shaw. It is extraordinary how our 
subject has beglaniourcd the age he has lived 
in ! He has lived in a world " seething with 
the reaction of Ibsen's ideas " — that has been a 
very ren\arkable experience for him. And all 
his friends and acquaintances have been the 
n\ost remarkable fellows. They have all 
attained to the dignity of mention in his 
prefaces or incorporation in his plays ; and this 
has ivdounded not only to their honour 
but to his own. No picture of our subject 
would be complete which did not take account 
of this veiled or spreading egotism. When 
posterity sits down to read straight through the 
works of oiu- subject, the profession of letters 
in the end of the ninettx^nth century and the 
beginning of the twentieth will appear a 
tremendously big adventure. And yet the 
truth is that our old world has not seethed. 
The profession of letters has been the usual 
con\fortable or uncomfortable jog-trot. The 



THE POET'S llEATxT 

things which exist over permanent and ini- 
nnitable have existed permanent and inmnit- 
able still. The truth is that om* subjeet, \'ov 
the purposes of effective assertion, has in- 
vented one ultimate anecdote; iind thnt 
anecdote is the anecdote of G. B. S. 

" Whenever a person tells us thnt he has 
fallen in >viih a man Nvho is acquainted with 
all the crafts, and who sums up in his own 
person all the knowledo^e possessed by other 
people singly, to a degree of accuracy which no 
one can siu'pass, we nnist n^ply to our in- 
formant,'' says Plato in his Republic, " that 
he is a silly fellow, and has apparently fallen 
in with a juggler and mimic." Well, INlr. Shaw 
fell in with a juggler and mimic, but he was not 
t^iken in. ''The legend of the superlative 
brilliance of G. B. S.," he has said, '" is all my 
eye." Wliat our subject has given he has not 
failed, with that even administration of laugh- 
ter which is the best of his powers, to take 
away. He would agree with the late Sanuiel 
Butler, that the advantage of doing one's 
praising for one's self is that one can lay it on 
so thick and in exactly the right places. 
Having created the Superman— or had we 
better say, in reverence for those terrible 
fellows the Nietzscheans, having taken out for 
the Superman papers of naturalization in 

151 



BERNARD SHAW 

England — our subject has laughed at the 
Superman as " a kind of good-looking, philoso- 
pher-athlete," if one remembers correctly. 
Having baptized the Life Force, he has laughed 
at the Life Force, for sounding (as, to be sure, 
it does sound) like the Life Guards. And in the 
same way, having created Mr. George Bernard 
Shaw by a sedulous care and devotion that are 
without a parallel in our contemporary literary 
history, he has laughed at Mr. George Bernard 
Shaw. There is no surer sign of the indwelling 
presence of the comic spirit than this ability of 
a man to laugh at himself, as well as at the 
forty-eight millions. But that is not the point 
for the moment. The point for the moment 
is that while our subject believes confidently 
that Mr. George Bernard Shaw will not be 
found out by the present, he believes with an 
equal confidence that Mr. George Bernard 
Shaw will be found out by the future. " The 
fact," he says, " that in all the professions 
there is one first favourite means no more than 
the fact that there is only one editor of The 
Times. It is not the man who is singular, but 
the position. The public imagination demands 
a best man everywhere ; and if Nature does 
not supply him th public invents him. The 
art of humbug is t art of getting invented in 
this way. Every .deration invents great 

152 



THE POET'S HEART 

men at whom posterity la\iglis when some 
aeeidcnt makes it aware of iliem." That 
passage from an obseure ceononiie pamj)lilet — 
(if we dare call obscure any economic pamphlet 
which our subject has written) — will serve as 
an instance of Mr. Shaw's legard for the 
future. It is a thoroughly romantic regard. 



IV 

To some slight extent the task of this book 
has been the uninvention of Mr. George 
Bernard Shaw, whom our subject has so 
diligently and artistically invented. Its task 
has been to get in ahead of posterity, and 
that is why it was necessary at the begimiing 
to declare as modestly as might be tor the 
rights of contemporary judgment. And now 
the only task which remains is the estimation 
of influence. 

Mr. Shaw has edified and delighted his age, 
but he has not profoundly affected it. His 
usefulness has been the usefulness of the man 
who, in face of our complacent assurance that 
our garments are white, has gone on reiterating 
his assertion that tliey are black, until we have 
looked at them and found ;hat in places they 
have turned a bit greyish His temperament 
does not know any half isures. He is like 

153 



BERNARD SHAW 

Falstaff in this, that he " had as lief they 
would put ratsbane in his mouth as offer to 
stop it with security." His unflagging good 
spirits, with their consequent excessiveness of 
utterance, while they have been the truest 
friend of his comic style, have been the worst 
enemy of his opinions. " A person who talks 
with equal vivacity on every subject," says 
Hazlitt, " excites no interest in any. Repose is 
as necessary in conversation as in a picture." 
It is the beauties of repose that have evaded 
Mr. Shaw's conversation. His first instinct, 
when he has got hold of an idea, has been to 
run out and tell us about it. All his life he has 
told us everything that came into his head — 
every single thing that came into his quite 
exceptional head. He has been like a busy 
salesman with a demand on his shop, so 
heavily engaged in handing out his goods 
that he has not been able to spare much 
attention to the manner of their wrapping. He 
has had so many ideas, and he has run out into 
the street so often, that his appearances, like 
those of the boy who called wolf, have affected 
his hearers less deeply than they ought to have 
done. In his presence, we have been in the 
position of the Duchess's baby in Alice, at 
whom the cook threw the saucepans : " the 
baby was howling so much already, that it 

154 



THE POET'S HEART 

was quite impossible to say whether the 
blows hurt it or not." He has given us 
a very great deal, but he somehow has not 
always given us just what we felt disposed to 
assimilate at the moment. In all the works of 
our subject there is a hint of the indiscreet 
helper, who does better than the scriptural 
injunction by giving us a cupful when we ask 
for half a cup. And Mr. Shaw has even given 
us some in the saucer. 

Nevertheless the person who can look into 
those works without being aware that Mr. 
Shaw wields the best everyday style of his 
generation is a person without judgment. In 
the best sense Mr. Shaw's has been the pen of 
the ready writer, a pen apt, humorous, and 
colloquial — even on occasion eloquent. He 
has thrown the sheets over his left shoulder 
with the rapidity of Count Fosco, but the most 
genuine labour has gone to their composition. 
Our subject is a great man, it cannot be too 
flatly or simply asserted, just in the degree, 
and just by reason of the fact, that he is a good 
writer. In the same manner in which we would 
rather have him philodoxical than that he had 
taken the degree of Ph.D. in all the colleges of 
Germany and America, so would we rather have 
his own first thoughts than the second thoughts 
of men who are duller. Everything he has 

155 



BERNARD SHAW 

written has radiated a very splendid kind of 
intelligence, even if it has not always revealed 
the profoundest sort of understanding. The 
person who can look into Arms and the Man or 
Man and Superman, or even into Fanny's 
First Play, and not be aware of this, is a person 
whose opinion is not worth taking upon the 
qualities of diction in comic drama. Concern- 
ing Mr. Shaw's drama in the bulk, you may 
assert that it is no more than good dialogue 
cut up into lengths, and that drama, in the 
full sense, is something more than good dialogue 
cut up into lengths. You may (quoting Mr. 
Shaw's Devil) sum up his plays as " interest- 
ing chats about things in general." You will 
have every appearance of justice in making 
the assertion. But it is not open to you to 
assert, if you wish your powers of comparative 
analysis as well as of instantaneous enjoy- 
ment to be respected, that Mr. Shaw's dialogue 
is not good comic dialogue. Similarly you 
may be as certain as you are of your faith or 
your pleasures that drama is made great by 
the grandeur or intensity of its emotion, and 
by no other quality at all. Again you will 
more than probably be right. But that 
will not justify you in denying all value 
to Mr. Shaw's drama because it is entirely 
without emotional value. When, however, 

156 



THE POET'S HEART 

you find Mr. Shaw asserting, in his capacity as 
judge, that drama is made great by the 
quantity and originality of its ideas, — then, ah 
then, you may fall upon him and slay him. 
You will slay the critic, but you will not slay 
the artist. The artist is what he has made, 
and Mr. Shaw has made a number of creatures, 
call them what you will, of which any honest 
man would be proud, in whatsoever aesthetic 
belief he had constructed them. 

The case of our subject is thus all kinds of a 
case. One looks in retrospect along that 
lengthy line of his works — each in its jacket of 
a jaegerized Lincoln-green seeming equally to 
stand for good taste and good hygiene — and 
one despairs of having done them any kind of 
justice ; one despairs of having given any 
kind of account of them at all. At least we 
have not done them the popular injustice 
contained in the assertion that they have 
" made us think." It is the tragic nemesis 
of Mr. Shaw as artist that he, the opponent 
of " reason," the ceaseless advocate of that 
happiness which is the living will's, should 
be held in high estimation by the young 
on every hand because he has " made them 
think." He is a strange fellow, he must 
be allowed his joke, he must be suffered 
to stand everything on its head, for, my 

157 



BERNARD SHAW 

goodness, how in the process he makes us 
think ! That is an unhappy ending for one of 
the strong souls who has had the will and 
courage to look facts in the face — and who 
would only have had us equally strong in order 
that we might look with him. It is Mr. Shaw's 
particular romanticism which is to blame for 
the misunderstanding ; the romanticism of the 
anti -romantic. He has so loved the " facts " ; he 
has so rushed at them ; he has so omitted to in- 
fect us with his own happiness regarding them. 
Take the one question of marriage. " There 
is no magic in marriage," Mr. Shaw says. But 
all this means is that Mr. Shaw sees no magic 
in marriage. He has not stopped long enough 
to see it. Turgenev defined the heart of 
another as a dark forest. That is the kind 
of attitude of mind that one would some- 
how expect in the artist. But Mr. Shaw sees 
right straight clean through the forest. The 
whole of his attitude consists in the ability to 
see right straight clean through it. Of the 
romance of finding in the human heart the 
wonder of a dark forest Mr. Shaw knows 
nothing ; his is the romance of denying the 
dark forest. He takes one look at the forest 
and he sees all the trees. Thus when the topic 
of marriage presents itself to his imagination, 
he becomes aware of a number of what one 

158 



THE POET'S HEART 

might call its minor considerations. He sees, 
for example, with unerring swiftness and 
decisiveness of vision, the practical difficulty of 
agreement between the partners to the con- 
tract as to how many clothes are to be 
on the bed. . . . About this point he promptly 
writes two comedies and a preface, and what 
they all amount to is, " You are wrong : there 
is no magic in marriage." 

Thus our subject's is all kinds of a case. He 
took up the English novel, and did nothing at 
all to assist it to the position which even then 
it was just slowly beginning to regain. He 
took up the English drama, and while he could 
not fail (in the circumstances) to write the 
most intelligent plays that had been written in 
England for a century, he will leave no path 
for the English drama to advance upon. The 
drama of discussion — (in technical form a genus 
of opera without music) — is too purely personal 
a product to have any future before it, or for 
us to wish that it may have any future apart 
from Mr. Shaw's future. As a critic of the 
arts, he has written about plays, and he has 
written about music, and he has written about 
pictures, in a manner supremely intelligent 
and delightful. But it is probable that, in his 
criticism of the theatre at least, there is 
too much of the impatience of the man who 

159 



BERNARD SHAW 

wants to get on to the job himself for these 
writings to rank amongst the best of their 
kind. Of the patient watchfulness which will 
wait, even as the artist's, upon perfection, of 
the instantaneous emotional responsiveness 
with which perfection in any kind is greeted, 
there is almost nothing in the criticism of Mr. 
Shaw. It was always an intellectual re- 
sponsiveness he had to offer. Mr. Shaw found 
that he could only laugh at The Importance 
of Being Earnest, and the reason why that 
was not enough was because other people 
were doing it. " Give me your ablest critic," 
says Ml*. Shaw, " and I will criticize his head 
off." He has criticized as many heads off as 
Alice's Duchess, but he has not always 
criticized the heart out of a work. Mr. Shaw 
is extremely fond of music, but about the 
last idea the stranger would gain, I suppose, 
from his treatise of Wagnerism, would be the 
idea that Wagner was a man who made 
music. 

In all Mr. Shaw's work in the arts, critical 
and creative, a part is thus played by the 
irrelevant motive. Never very far from the 
centre of his mind are " all the detestable 
fruits of inequality of condition." In this life 
there are secular hardships and anomalies 
enough for correction, God knows ; but the 

160 



THE POET'S HEART 

artist, qua artist, does not find, I suppose, 
the fruits of inequality of condition detest- 
able. For him they rather add to the fun 
of the human spectacle. But Mr. Shaw is 
out to alter all that. What Mr. Shaw wants, 
more than anything else, is to change our 
ideas ; and art is a weapon in the chambarde- 
ment general. He condescends to the fun 
of the human spectacle, not for its own sake, 
but to point a moral. Just as the persons 
of his drama are logical abstractions to whom, 
to aid in their acceptance, a surface humanity 
is added, so is his drama itself a secondary 
image of his picture of the world. He sees 
men as ideas walking. He sees art as a con- 
flict of ideas. A thousand lovable, intimate, 
humorous, ridiculous, recognizable traits he 
sees, and he makes a pastiche of them for his 
purposes. They do not result in the comic 
vision. (Impossible, when the whole stretch 
of his work is remembered, to say that they 
result in that !) They do not result in the 
tragic vision. " The very same thing, don't 
you see," says Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, 
" may be looked at tragically, and turned 
into misery, or it may be looked at simply 
and even humorously." Impossible to assert 
that Mr. Shaw has turned things into misery. 
All the time one remembers Trefusis, that 
L 161 



BERNARD SHAW 

hero of his early novel, whose " sympathies 
were kept awake and his indignation main- 
tained at an exhilarating pitch by the suffer- 
ings of the poor." Mr. Shaw's vision is so 
composed of mind and heart that it has 
maintained his indignation " at an exhilarating 
pitch." It is the publicist's vision. 



Thus it comes about that the final estimation 
of our subject must be ideological. " Nothing 
is more certain," said Mill, " than that improve- 
ment in human affairs is wholly the work of 
the uncontented characters." Our subject is a 
thoroughly uncontented character. He has a 
special faculty for putting the world in the 
wrong. He cannot think of the human species 
with patience. He is the antithesis of that 
character whom one remembers in one of Mr. 
Henry James's novels (and indeed, who might 
have occurred in any one of them) who " looked 
about him like a man to whom everything 
suggested a cheerful interpretation." He has 
delighted us with man, he has delighted us 
with woman, but finally and profoundly man 
has not delighted him, nor woman neither. 

162 



THE POET'S HEART 

That is why he has called for the Superman. 
He has expressed from all the platforms in the 
park an explicit detestation of the fruits of 
inequality of condition ; he has written a 
matter of thirty plays with the expressed 
purpose of destroying our old - established 
morals ; and now, as his stream nears the sea, 
he finds himself " driven to offer to young 
people in our suburbs the desperate advice : 
do something that will get you into trouble " 
(Preface, Fanny's First Play). I suppose, since 
an improvement in human affairs is a business 
that takes time to show itself, that the con- 
temporary measure of the success of an 
uncontented character is the number of the 
uncontented characters he has made. As 
regards the actual influence of our subject on his 
generation, there has been a good deal of " bear- 
ing " on the part of those who share Mr. Shaw's 
belief that the public demands a best man 
everywhere, and who rather fancy (although 
they do not perhaps make the admission even in 
private) that they themselves are the man. 
There has been a good deal of " bulling " 
on the part of those who are actually as 
youthful in years as Mr. Shaw has remained 
in spirit. His reputation will find its own 
level about midway between those two points, 
as reputations do, after the market has been 

163 



BERNARD SHAW 

higgled. All Mr. Shaw's higgling of his own 
market will not matter at all. That is merely 
a trait in the portrait ; that is merely the 
particular cry with which he has brought 
his goods to market. Let us hope that our 
subject has made a very great number of 
uncontented characters. Let us hope that the 
suburbs are filled with young people of both 
sexes who have taken his desperate advice ; 
who nurse, each one of them, the secret in 
the poet's heart. Let us hope that they are 
Eugenes and Major Barbaras, every one of 
them. 

And with that hope expressed, one sur- 
renders again the pen explanatory into the 
hand in which it is so much more amusing — 
into the hand one wishes may go on wielding 
it for ever. We have been, during these few 
pages, no more than that " Voice " at the 
political meeting which interpolates its remark 
between the remarks of the principal speaker ; 
that " Voice " whose function it is to contribute 
to the successfulness of the meeting, and whose 
immortality it is to see itself in print the next 
morning. Perhaps, in however small a degree, 
we have contributed to the successfulness of 
Mr. Shaw's meeting. And if we have not, then 
this will be a suitable point at which to retire 
from it ; fo :, frankly and finally, the business 

104 



THE POET'S HEART 

of estimating the effective iiiHuence of a man on 
his generation is a business one despairs of 
achieving. Mr. Shaw has on so many oecjisions 
piped unto us, and we liave not danxu'd ; lie 
has mourned unto us, and we Iiav(^ not 
lamented. He has expressed his distaste for 
the scorched corpses of animals, and we con- 
tinue to eat meat with our bread. He has 
commented with all his force upon the de- 
terioration in the figure and character of 
Falstaff, and we continue to drink beer with 
our meat. He has held up his hands in horror 
at the British double bed, and we continue to 
sleep in it. He has proved that there is not 
a single credible established religion in the 
world, and we continue to believe in it. He 
has mined with his absurdity and blown up 
with his wrath the institution of the family, 
and the institution of the family continues to 
exist and is daily refortified. He has pointed 
the finger of ridicule at our very own indis- 
pensable mothers, and we have laughed at the 
ridiculousness which Mr. Shaw has seen and 
we have seen something else besides. All his 
life he has been like King Cole ; he has called 
for this, and he has called for that, and some 
of the things for which he has called we have 
brought him, and some we have not brought 
him. On behalf of the generation he has 

1G5 



BERNARD SHAW 

adorned and illuminated, " We now call for 
the Superman," he says. Do not let the 
last words of this book assert that there will 
be no answer. 



Angust^ 1914. 



166 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The following list is in illustration of the text. It 
does not pretend to be exhaustive. 

1880 The Irrational Knot (composed). Serial pub- 

lication in " Our Corner," 1885-7. American 
edition, with preface, Brentano, New York, 
1905. English edition. Constable, 1905 ; 
cheap edition, 1914. 

1881 Love Among the Artists (composed). Serial 

publication in " Our Corner," 1887-8. Amer- 
ican edition, with preface, Herbert S. Stone 
and Co., Chicago, 1900 ; English cheap 
edition, Constable, 1914. 

1882 Cashel Byron's Profession (composed). Serial 

publication in " To-day," 1885-6. English 
edition, 1886 ; new edition revised (The 
Novocastrian Novels), 1889 ; newly revised 
(Novels of His Nonage, No. 4, with The 
Admirable Bashville and a Note on Modern 
Prize-Fighting), 1901 ; cheap edition, 1914. 

1883 An Unsocial Socialist (composed). Serial 

publication in "To-day," 1884. EngHsh 
edition, Sonnenschein, 1887 ; cheap edition. 
Constable, 1914. 

169 



BERNARD SHAW 

1889 Fabian Essays (edited and with two essays 

by). 

1891 The Quintessence of Ihsenism. Ditto, now com- 

pleted to the death of Ibsen, 1913. 

The Legal Eight Hours Question. A public 
debate between Mr. George Bernard Shaw 
and Mr. J. W. Foote. 

The Impossibilities of Anarchism (tract). Re- 
printed with Foreword in " Sociahsm and 
Individuahsm," Fabian Sociahst Series, 1908. 

1892 The Fabian Society : Its Early History (tract). 

Gronlund's " Co-operative Commonwealth " 
(Bellamy library, No. 7), edited by G. B. 
Shaw. 

1893 Widowers' Houses (Independent Theatre Series 

of Plays, No. 2), with Preface. 

1894 Socialism and Superior Brains (in " Fort- 

nightly Review," April). Fabian tract, 1909, 
with Preface. 

A Dramatic Realist to his Critics (in " New 
Review," September). 

1896 Socialism for Millionaires (in "Contemporary 
Review," February). Fabian tract, 1901, 
with Prefatory Note. 

On Going to Church (in " Savoy," January). 
Reprinted, Boston, J. W. Luce and Co., 1909. 

170 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1898 The Perfect Wagnerite : A Commentary on the 
Niblung's Ring. Second edition, with new 
Preface, 1901. 

Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. The First 
Volume, containing the three Unpleasant 
Plays (Grant Richards) : 

Widowers' Houses (composed 1885-92, 
produced 1892) ; The Philanderer (com- 
posed — , produced 1907) ; Mrs. Warren s 
Profession (composed 1894, produced 
1902). With Preface, Mainly About My- 
self. 

The Second Volume, containing the four 
Pleasant Plays (Grant Richards) : 

Arms and the Man (composed 1894, pro- 
duced 1894) ; Candida (composed 1894-5, 
produced 1897) ; The Man of Destiny 
(composed 1895, produced 1897) ; You 
Never Can Tell (composed 1896, produced 
1900). With Preface. 

1900 Fabianism and the Empire. Edited by, 

with Preface. 

The Dynamitards of Science (London Anti- 
Vivisection Society pamphlet). 

1901 Three Plays for Puritans : 

The DeviVs Disciple (composed 1897, pro- 
duced 1899) ; Ccesar and Cleopatra (com- 
posed 1898, produced 1899) ; Captain Brass- 
bound's Conversion (composed 1899, pro- 

171 



BERNARD SHAW 

duced 1902). With Prefaces, Why for 
Puritans ? ; On Diabolonian Ethics ; Better 
than Shakespeare ? 

Who I Am, and What I Think (in " Candid 
Friend," May 11). 

1902 Mrs. Warren's Profession, Stage Society edition. 

With the Author's apology. 

1903 Man and Superman : A Comedy and a Phil- 

osophy. With Epistle dedicatory. The Revo- 
lutionist's Handbook, and Maxims for Revo- 
lutionists. Popular edition, with Foreword, 
1911. 

1904 Fabianism and the Fiscal Question. 

The Commonsense of Municipal Trading. With 
new Preface, 1908. 

1905 The Theatre of the Future (in " Grand Maga- 

zine," February). 

1907 Dramatic Opinions and Essays. (Reprinted 

from the " Saturday Review," 1895-8.) 

John BulVs Other Island (composed 1904, 
produced 1904), and Major Barbara (com- 
posed 1905, produced 1905) : also How He 
Lied to Her Husband (composed 1904, pro- 
duced 1905). With Prefaces ; for Politicians, 
and First Aid to Critics. 

1908 The Sanity of Art : An Exposure of the Current 

Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate. 

172 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

(First published under title " A Degenerate's 
View of Nordau," in New York " Liberty," 
1896.) 

The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. By 
William H. Davies. With a Preface by 
Bernard Shaw. 

1909 Press Cuttings : A Topical Sketch compiled 
from the editorial and correspondence columns 
of the Daily Papers. 

The Unmentionable Case for Women's Su^rage 
(in the " Englishwoman," March). 

1911 The Doctor's Dilemma (composed 1906, pro- 

duced 1906) ; Getting Married (composed 
1908, produced 1908) ; and The Shezving-up 
of Blanco Posnet (composed 1909, produced 
1909). With Prefaces; On Doctors, On 
Marriage and Divorce, and On Censorship. 

Three Plays by Brieux. With a Preface by 
Bernard Shaw. 

1912 John Bull's Other Island. Home Rule Edition, 

with Preface. 

Overruled (produced). 

1913 The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Now Completed 

to the Death of Ibsen. With Preface : 1913. 

Hard Times (Waverley Edition of the works 
of Dickens). With an Introduction by 
Bernard Shaw. 

173 



BERNARD SHAW 

John BulVs Other Island (revived). Letter to 
the audience on Laughter. 

Androcles and the Lion (produced). Prefatory 
note to programme. 

Great Catherine (produced). 

1914 Misalliance (composed 1910, produced 1910), 
The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (composed 
1910, produced 1910), and Fanny's First 
Play {composed 1911, produced 1911). With 
a Treatise on Parents and Children. And 
Preface on Shakespeare. 

Pygmalion (produced). 

The Music Cure (produced) . 

KilHng for Sport. By Henry S. Salt, etc. With 
a Preface by Bernard Shaw. 

The Case for Equality. An Address to the 
PoHtical and Economic Circle of the National 
Liberal Club, with some further letters to 
the Press on the subject. 



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